https://medium.com/@bridgetstellaruxtonwilson/my-lonely-time-in-managed-isolation-x-7-aa90806f5477
Hollywood has a lot to answer for. Think of all those boy-meets-girl movies when they fall for each other in the first scene, hook up straight away – and then it’s happy ever after. But life’s not usually like that and sometimes things get messy in the love stakes. Love or relationship addiction is a real thing and sometimes it gets so bad we need help. No-one ever taught us how to navigate a relationship, right? And if we come from dysfunctional families (as most of us do) we need to learn how to go about this tricky business. Falling in love/lust/whatever floods the brain with neuro chemicals that make us feel really good. It’s no wonder some people can’t get enough of this feeling. If you’ve had a series of intense relationships that become the focus of your life, you’ll know that it’s difficult to focus on anything else when you’re in the relationship. If you think you might be addicted to love and relationships, here are a few questions you might find helpful to ask yourself:
Love Addiction Is Also Known as Co or pro-dependence One definition of co-dependency is ‘excessive emotional or psychological reliance on a partner, typically one who requires support on account of their illness or addiction’. The co-dependent person often puts another’s needs ahead of their own and becomes so focussed on their partner that they stop caring for themselves and can get sick as well. Codependency usually gets started in childhood. Often, a child grows up in a home where their emotions are ignored or punished. This emotional neglect can give the child low self-esteem and shame. The home may also be affected by addiction, usually a parent or both parents whose addiction will disrupt the healthy development of the child or children. One of the leading authors on the subject of codependence and love/relationship addiction is Melody Beattie whose book Codependent No More is full of good information on the subject. Her definition of a codependent person is one who has let another person’s behaviour affect him or her, and who is obsessed with controlling that person’s behaviour. Other codependent behaviours may include:
Children whose parents were emotionally unavailable run the risk of being codependent themselves. As adults, we often find ourselves in relationships in which our partner is emotional unavailable – we’re attracted to what we know. And that’s where the trouble often lies because we stay in the unhealthy relationship, wishing to change our partner. We hold out with the hope that, against all the odds, one day things will be OK. Deep down we hope that our partner will see all the good in us and want to change and that if we just hold out and try harder, give all our love and understanding and support, we will finally get the love and affection that we crave. This thinking is damaging to us and our relationships. It’s particularly destructive if our partner is abusive – either emotionally or physically – or both. It gets dangerous when we don’t understand the reality of the situation and carry on living in a loveless relationship because we don’t in fact know what that looks like. Codependent people often don’t believe they are worthy of love and they settle for less, finding themselves putting up with emotional, physical and even sexual abuse from their partner. Codependents will often look for external things to feel better – alcohol and other drugs or behaviours that are not healthy. They start relationships that are unhealthy, wanting to ‘fix’ the other person who is often in active addiction themselves and therefore emotionally unavailable. Good reading on the subject of codependence and recovery from it can be found at: www.coda.org Or Dr Rob Weiss’s excellent book: https://www.fishpond.co.nz/Books/Prodependence-Weiss-Robert/9780757320354?utm_source=googleps&utm_medium=ps&utm_campaign=NZ&gclid=Cj0KCQjws4aKBhDPARIsAIWH0JUpdU48-lJJkEFFS3TRpCgL4HIHVlgiGrDsFDiwrx5aKMzgRAB_g8gaAky3EALw_wcB Fear of intimacy is a terrible thing. It’s gets in the way of relationships, a good sex life, and is at the core of sex addiction.
A researcher and writer who I admire is Marilyn Mason, PhD, LCP, whose booklet simply called Intimacy is a good read. She says there are nine types of intimacy and you need to practise them all within the context of a committed relationship in order to develop an intimate relationship. Sex is an intimate experience, but doesn’t mean you’re having an intimate relationship. That takes time and commitment. Intimacy is a multi-faceted thing. Dr Mason says the following are the nine different types of intimacy.
Otherwise, it’s just casual sex. Sex without commitment can be like a pyrrhic victory. Images come to mind of that harrowing 2011 film Shame with Michael Fassbender as an out-of-control sex addict. His casual encounters with random women left him devastated - and me as a viewer, reeling. In my work as a sex-addiction therapist I’ve come to the conclusion that sex addiction is an intimacy disorder. That fear of intimacy keeps people in a loop of repeating the same behaviour (watching porn, paying for sex workers, extra-marital affairs) while expecting a different outcome. The hapless sex and love addict who can’t find true connection with his/her partner goes looking for it with other men or women, only to be heart-broken each time the affair ends in tears and more scar tissue forms on their heart. It’s hard work, maintaining a long-term relationship and the sad thing is that lots of people just give up and give in and live in despair. I don’t think Thoreau meant that we should abandon hope when he wrote about ‘the mass of men living in quiet desperation’ in his book Walden. It does require a certain type of self-reflection, of course, and getting rigorously honest with ourselves. I’ll finish off with my favourite quote from Hamlet: To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. George Bernard Shaw once said something along the lines of ‘Youth is wasted on the young’ and I get what he means – i.e. you fritter away your life as a young person because you don’t appreciate the gift of youth.
I always wanted to be older, more grown-up, longing to do the things that my parents did like drink and smoke and swan around, seemingly without a care in the world. Whereas my world was full of angst and fear and slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (W. Shakespeare, Hamlet). No matter that my parents had endured their own slings and arrows, having survived WWII. I’m still coming to terms with the privations they must have suffered as a result of that ghastly war. So, after reading Kerala Taylor’s excellent Medium piece, My Daughter is Gorgeous, and I Wish She Wasn’t, https://medium.com/the-motherload/my-daughter-is-gorgeous-and-i-wish-she-wasnt-8a18f698970b I want to modify Shaw’s quote and say that beauty is wasted on the young. Most babies are born beautiful – that skin, the innocence, the trust – and they haven’t a clue. Then later, the long, leggy, gawky teenagers with pimples – not one iota of understanding about their youthful beauty, so agonized by the acne. Only with the benefit of hindsight, I can see my own beauty when I look at old photographs with a certain amount of objectivity. I had no idea at the time. I was so full of insecurity and fear (that word again), that I was blinded by the fright of it all. I’m now at that strange stage of being seemingly invisible. I forget I’m a middle-aged woman and sometimes expect, but then miss, the looks of men in the street. They look right past me. Back in the day (New Zealand men were slow to grasp the concepts of feminism), I had mixed feelings when guys on building sites whistled at me. I knew it was somehow wrong, but I liked the attention. And if I was quick enough, I would get in first and whistle at them. It gave me a bit of a thrill to see them perched up on their struts and nearly falling off at the shock of a 20-something female whistling at them, way below on the street. Cheeky tart We used to do that kind of thing a lot. The shock factor was a little bit thrilling. Back then, there were such things as public bars that wouldn’t serve women. So, with our burgeoning feminism strapped tight across our chests, we would storm such bars, demanding to be served. I remember at one bar in Wellington, circa 1971, the barman suggested that I might like to go into the ‘ladies’ parlour’ because I mightn’t like the language of the men in the public bar. ‘I don’t give a fuck,’ I said, standing my ground. He chuckled and gave me my drink. Part of why I got away with it was because I was cute. Still in my 20s, I got a job reading the news on a regional television news programme. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t because of my journalistic chops. And that led me to the conclusion that there’s a bit of a double standard operating between the genders. My male colleagues who went on to have stellar careers in front of the camera did get the jobs because of their chops. It sure wasn’t for their looks. If women looked like some of them, they would never have got near a camera. The attention was still a mixed bag, because when our little new program first went to air, I didn’t like being written about in the local newspaper. But I was lucky because in the early 80s the so-called cult of celebrity still hadn’t reached these distant shores and my private life stayed private. Unlike my fellow Medium scribe, Kerala Taylor, I'm still worried about too much attention (although I’d like a few more kind followers, hint hint, so I can have a crack at being paid) because I haven’t been trolled and am wondering how I’d cope if someone wrote something nasty in the comments. It also brings to mind another quotable writer, Oscar Wilde, who cleverly said, 'There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.' After being such a compulsive writer for so long (I was a journo for 30-odd years), I’ll keep going in the chance that maybe one day I’ll earn a buck or two because my writing, not my looks, will earn me the recognition I deserve. But I need to get 100 followers first. A friend sounded as if she wanted to quit smoking, so as I’m an addictions therapist I thought I’d throw a few ideas at her. She thought she’d go cold turkey. I explained that you don’t want to go cold turkey because that’s just asking for trouble (read: relapse). You need to make a plan. Get a calendar in front of you and choose a date some time in the not too distant future and make that your quit date.
Start off by smoking mindfully. Make at least one or two cigarettes a day your mindful smokes and just smoke — don’t do anything else at the time. Work up all five senses: what can you see, hear, smell, taste and touch? First of all open the pack of cigarettes and have a good sniff. Really smell the tobacco; have a good sniff of what’s inside, smelling the contents. Hold the pack in your hand and run your fingers over it, feeling the smooth covering. Hear the sound of it, the crinkling of the cellophane cover, the sound of the flame igniting the tip of the cigarette, the noise the burning tobacco makes, your inward breath. Taste the flavour of the smoke on your palate. Watch as the smoke disappears into your mouth, imagine it going down your windpipe, down down, into your lungs; imagine the smoke swirling around your lungs as they expand with the inward breath and then notice that as your lungs contract with the outward breath, the smoke travelling back up the windpipe and then becoming visible again as it forms a cloud coming out of your mouth. Do that with the whole cigarette. Taking the visualisation exercise a step further, imagine, if you can, the nicotine and the other chemicals in the tobacco travelling through the thin walls of your lungs and into the blood stream all the way to your brain where the nicotine receptor sites will bless you for smoking another cigarette and giving them what they want. That’s all addiction is. Your brain getting what it wants. It’s just a thought; it’s not even a craving. Craving only starts with the first puff (or drink, or any other drug or addictive behaviour). So if you believe the old maxim: ‘my brain tells me lies’, then you’re on your way. Nothing really bad is going to happen if you quit, but your addict brain will fool you into thinking terrible things will happen to you if you don’t smoke or use or drink or . . . fill in the gaps yourself. What’s the worst that could happen if you don’t smoke? You might be a little cranky for a few days, you might cross-addict to food for a while. The addict brain isn’t choosy about where it gets its goods, so watch out for other things that may come up as alternatives. You might notice that you need to keep putting food in your mouth, or drinking more — use the same techniques and become mindful. Really get those five senses working and simply accept what’s going on. That’s where Step One comes into the picture. ‘Admitted we were powerless over [nicotine, food, alcohol or other drugs, behaviours like watching porn etc] that our lives had become unmanageable.’ This means that you can’t control the thing you’re addicted to (it generally controls you) and it’s making your life unmanageable (think consequences). I like to think of powerlessness as being like making a decision to surrender — think old-school armies when one side had lost too many men and they would get out the white flag and wave it so the other side would see that the losing side were beat and couldn’t fight any more. The fighting would then stop. When we make that decision to stop the fight, it becomes easier to quit whatever it is we’re addicted to. Trying to control the use never worked, right? Then the second part of Step One is acknowledging the unmanageability which is really the consequences of your using. Maybe the police are involved (not with cigarettes, of course, but definitely a possibility with alcohol or other drugs), or you’ve got a hacking cough that won’t go away or you have shortness of breath, or, god forbit, chest pains. Of course the worst consequence is mortality and yet your denial stops you from even thinking about that. Addict brain overrides rational brain every time until we can really understand the fundamentals of Step One. Figure out how many cigarettes you smoke a day and do the maths and make a plan for how many you can cut down by each week without your addict brain freaking out and do it gradually. Get a quit buddy and do it together. Stick to the plan. Smoke mindfully. Work Step One. Simple. I remember writing in my journal some time in the 70s: ‘I keep listening to people not listening to each other’. I was in my early 20s and on my first OE and was becoming a keen observer of human interaction. When I noticed how people would talk to each other, seemingly not really listening, it bothered me. Still does. As a news reporter I’d listen back to my tapes (old-school, I know) after the interview and hear where I’d missed an opportunity to ask a follow-up question because I was intent on asking the next one. And I’d think to myself: ‘Listen, girl’. Much later I became a therapist and learnt the gentle art of reflective listening. This involves reflecting back part of what a client has just said so they know they’re being heard. Sometimes a therapist might be the first person who’s really listened to them if they’ve been in active addiction for a while. So back to the not-really-listening conversations, what I often hear goes something like this: Person #1: I’m really struggling with this lockdown; I’m so lonely. Person #2: I’m so pissed off I can’t go to McDonald’s any more! We’re so intent on telling each other what’s going on for us, we sometimes forget to actually hear what the other person is saying – let alone acknowledging their vulnerability. It’s a weird kind of fear of intimacy. Maybe we’re too scared to get too close to each other because the vulnerability might be catching in some way. Gotta man up – or as Kiwi women say ‘put your big girl pants on’. In this time of isolation I’m seeing a craving for connection. I see this in myself, as well. When I first went walking during the lockdown, I would try to make eye contact with others out pounding the pavement and when they did actually look at me, I would say hi or gidday or something. And I had to stop because I saw that it wasn’t going down well at all. Some people looked scared and surprised. Who was this crazy woman? So I put an end to it and kept my head down. Now, three weeks later, as I venture out for my daily walk I notice that more people are initiating eye contact with me and saying hello. The difference three weeks makes! Even that brief connection, a smile and a greeting, gives me a sense of belonging. We’re all in this together and we’re getting through it, one brief connection at a time. In these weird times I believe we need that connection more than ever. I remember writing in my journal some time in the 70s: ‘I keep listening to people not listening to each other’. I was in my early 20s and on my first OE and was becoming a keen observer of human interaction. When I noticed how people would talk to each other, seemingly not really listening, it bothered me. Still does.
As a news reporter I’d listen back to my tapes (old-school, I know) after the interview and hear where I’d missed an opportunity to ask a follow-up question because I was intent on asking the next one. And I’d think to myself: ‘Listen, girl’. Much later I became a therapist and learnt the gentle art of reflective listening. This involves reflecting back part of what a client has just said so they know they’re being heard. Sometimes a therapist might be the first person who’s really listened to them if they’ve been in active addiction for a while. So back to the not-really-listening conversations, what I often hear goes something like this: Person #1: I’m really struggling with this lockdown; I’m so lonely. Person #2: I’m so pissed off I can’t go to McDonald’s any more! We’re so intent on telling each other what’s going on for us, we sometimes forget to actually hear what the other person is saying – let alone acknowledging their vulnerability. It’s a weird kind of fear of intimacy. Maybe we’re too scared to get too close to each other because the vulnerability might be catching in some way. Gotta man up – or as Kiwi women say ‘put your big girl pants on’. In this time of isolation I’m seeing a craving for connection. I see this in myself, as well. When I first went walking during the lockdown, I would try to make eye contact with others out pounding the pavement and when they did actually look at me, I would say hi or gidday or something. And I had to stop because I saw that it wasn’t going down well at all. Some people looked scared and surprised. Who was this crazy woman? So I put an end to it and kept my head down. Now, three weeks later, as I venture out for my daily walk I notice that more people are initiating eye contact with me and saying hello. The difference three weeks makes! Even that brief connection, a smile and a greeting, gives me a sense of belonging. We’re all in this together and we’re getting through it, one brief connection at a time. In these weird times I believe we need that connection more than ever. On Okarito
In the early seventies in New Zealand, a small but burgeoning sub-culture of young people were buying up land in the backblocks. Property was super-cheap in those hidden-away places. Back then, before we had a tourism industry, people didn’t generally visit places like Okarito on the wild West Coast in the deep south of the South Island. This tiny settlement – not even big enough to be a town in those days – lay at the end of a dusty road. Half of its handful of weather-beaten houses faced the thunderous surf and the other half looked out over a still, calm estuary. If Okarito was known for anything, it was a colony of white herons or kotuku: ghostly, elegant birds, who lived and bred in a sanctuary. A few, less sophisticated creatures also lived there, but mostly it was a place for baches, or modest holiday homes built of wood. Back in the 1860s gold miners from all over the world had arrived in their droves by ship and had to navigate a treacherous sandbar which claimed a few lives over the years. Before the arrival of the wannabe millionaires, it was a Maori settlement, whose residents had easy access to kaimoana (seafood) – and those styly white kotuku feathers which they wove into korowai (cloaks). In the summer of 1973, my old school friend Jill Poulston and I hitch-hiked for hours, starting our journey in Christchurch on the east coast, a good 150km away. I had just finished my first job at the Timaru Herald after graduating journalism school at Wellington Polytechnic at the end of 1971. Jill was still at teachers’ training college in Christchurch, and I was on my way to the Great Ngaruawahia Music Festival, the first of its kind in New Zealand. I had no plans for any further employment but later that year ended up working at the New Zealand Press Association in Wellington. Jill went on to have a stellar career as an academic, ending up with a PhD and lecturing in her specialist subject all over the world. I stayed with journalism for 36 years before being made redundant along with scores of other sub-editors, then retraining in my mid-50s as an addictions therapist. Back in 1973 we were 20 years old and, being car-less, hitch-hiking was our only option and still a relatively safe mode of transport in those innocent days. The 1970 murder of a hitch-hiker called Jennifer Beard had been widely reported, and the year before I’d interviewed Gordon Bray, the police’s primary suspect who was at the time living in Timaru, but he was never arrested and the case remains unsolved. Clearly, we were in denial that such a thing would happen again and happily hitched all over the country and later in Europe as well. Anyway, getting to Okarito wasn’t that easy because public transport in that neck of the woods was unheard of in those days. We finally made it to Okarito and thanked our last lift who’d picked us up just off the main road on the rugged West Coast and driven us for a good hour along the bumpy, dusty, final leg into Okarito. It wasn’t hard to find our mates, the new landowners (of which Jill was one), who were putting up a fairly shabby tent on their match-box sized piece of Okarito dirt. I’d known we’d all be camping – there were about six or seven of us – and had brought my own sleeping bag. And at that tender age, I was not yet one for thinking things through, so hadn’t banked on there being nothing between my sleeping bag and the sandy Okarito soil. It was raining. West Coast rain is a bit different to rain in other parts of New Zealand, nay, the world. It’s like a wall of water. That day it was coming down in container-sized shipments. Luckily, I’d brought my trusty oil-skin parka, a garment so popular with so many of the Kiwi population in those days that it was considered a fashion statement. It came with its own special odour because the coarse, black fabric had indeed been infused with oil, giving it its water-proof property. The loose sleeves were slightly too long and its shapeless length hung around knee-level. A beautifully proportioned body underneath the famous Kiwi oil-skin parka could easily go undetected. It was unseasonably cold for summer. My sandalled feet squished through the ubiquitous puddles, and I started to wonder why I had come to this godforsaken place. The tent people explained that we needed supplies, so after we pooled our limited funds, Jill and I set off for the only grocery gig in town. The general store at Okarito had definitely been there since the gold-rush days. Its ancient weather boards had lost any remnant of paint decades ago. The sign on the front, General Store, looked as if it belonged in a period film. I half expected to see a hitching post. We marveled at the quaintness of the shop inside. Cans of food on the wooden shelves looked like they had been there for 20 years. Shafts of sunlight angled in through a few high windows, and millions of dust motes floated in the still air. As we wandered along the wide, wooden, creaking floorboards, looking for ingredients for a meal, I noticed a man with straggly, shoulder-length brown hair and a bushy beard. He looked much older than us; at least 30. He was talking to the storekeeper in a familiar way, so I guessed he was a local. I had a habit of guessing what people did for work. ‘I bet he’s a poet,’ I whispered to Jill. Back at the campsite the tent was finally up. It had been hard yakka and someone broke out some beers. We sat around inside the tent, drinking the luke-warm, weak Kiwi ale and toasted the fact that some of our damp little party had achieved the title of landowner. Dinner was a non-descript, cobbled-together array of unappetising things we’d bought at the store. The rain meant we couldn’t use the barbeque, so there wasn’t much else to do but to go to bed. I wriggled into my sleeping bag which I found a space for on the edge of the elderly tent. It was leaking in places. After an uncomfortable night of sleeping restlessly on the hard ground, I woke up to realise my sleeping bag was wet through in places; I was cold and grumpy and alone in the tent. The rain had eased off to a damp drizzle and a weak sun was trying hard to break through the thick cloud cover. The Southern Alps in the distance were shrouded in mist and a pervading grey gloom seemed to envelop everything. The weather didn’t help my low mood. The others had gone off to explore, and by the time I decided to go looking for them it was mid-morning. I was clambering around some rocks by the water’s edge when a man’s voice called out. It was coming from somewhere above me. As I stopped, balancing precariously with feet on two rocks, I looked up to see it was the poet. He was waving to me from the deck of his bach, on a small rise above the township. ‘Do you like mussels?’ he shouted. ‘I picked a whole feed of them this morning and there’s too many just for me.’ I hadn’t had anything to eat since the meal the night before and I was hungry. Now I’d have a chance to check out my theory about the ‘poet’; he looked very interesting. His name was Dick Nicholls. He wasn’t a poet at all, but worked in a library in Victoria University in Wellington and wrote record reviews in his spare time. He was staying in his parents’ bach for a week to get away from the city. I was intrigued. No-one as old as Dick had ever paid me any attention. He seemed genuinely to want to hear what I had to say. He was 32. I was wearing a silver roach clip on a thin strip of leather around my neck. I’d bought it in Wellington at one of those ‘head’ stores that smelled of incense and the fragrant oils that hippies wore. The tips that clasped the numerous roaches I’d smoked were slightly discoloured. I treasured it; there was something beautiful in the symmetry of the silver clasps that I liked a lot. ‘I needed that,’ I said after I had gorged on the fresh mussels that Dick had served up. Their luscious, fat bodies were a taste sensation. Afterwards, over a cup of tea Dick asked me if I would like a smoke. He deftly rolled a joint and we finished it off using my roach clip, which Dick admired. We talked for hours and hours and seemed to speak the same language despite our enormous age difference. I told Dick about my wet sleeping bag. ‘You can stay here if you like,’ he offered. Not looking forward to another uncomfortable night in the leaky tent, I accepted. Dick was open about living with his long-term girlfriend in Wellington, but kindly proposed I share the other half of his bed. He was a gentle, tender lover, not that I had much to compare him with. I’d had one or two trysts with inept boys, so my sexual experiences this far had left me wondering why people made such a fuss about this thing called sex. Now I began to understand. I felt so close to Dick and told him things I’d never told anyone. Dick and I barely left each other’s side for the three days in his parents’ modest, little wooden bach. We talked and talked and laughed and laughed, and at night – and sometimes during the day – he made love to me with a tenderness I didn’t know was possible. Given that he was in a long-term relationship, I quite liked the notion that I could be a mistress. It seemed somehow to be an exotic vocation – romance without the mundane domain of domesticity. Dick gave me permission to fart without being ashamed. We both farted with gay abandon whenever we felt like it and laughed at each other’s wit and stories. He was a great reader and had read authors I had never heard of. In quiet times he gave me books to read. I devoured one of Anais Nin’s diaries and felt an immediate kinship with the author. Dick told me that Nin had been the mistress of the great American writer Henry Miller, which added to my fantasy about the role of mistress that I thought I could see myself carrying off with aplomb. Nin, married to a conservative banker, was such a wonderfully glamorous, free spirit; no-one in her affairs of the heart ever seemed to get hurt. I admired the way she wrote about her therapy sessions with the distinguished Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank, who had been a colleague of Freud. Nin alluded to a ménage a trois with Miller and his wife June which also sent me off into daydreams about how I might like to try out this kind of encounter. ‘I wonder what it’d be like to do psychoanalysis,’ I thought out loud to Dick. What would it be like to delve into one’s self? Nin used the word ‘self’ a lot; it was a new notion that I liked the sound of. Taking Nin’s lead, in the late 70s I did embark on a revelatory course of several months of therapy with the respected psychiatrist Dr Roberta Highton at Ashburn Hall in Dunedin. But that’s another story, suffice it to say that I knew no-one else who was doing psychotherapy and I was terrified that someone would see me creeping in to the dreary old psychiatric hospital each week trying to look incognito. At the time, part of my job as a television reporter involved reading the news on the nightly South Tonight regional TV news programme. We’ve come a long way since then by recognising and destigmatising mental health issues, but back then my shame was palpable. When it was time to leave Okarito, Dick gave me Nin’s diary, volume three 1939-1944 which was published in 1963. As I walked down the path back to the tent it was hard to read his inscription through my tears. It read: ‘Build up your own private inner world and save a space for me. Farts, yawns, and belches to BW from RNipples. Okarito New Year 1973!’ He marked page 139 where Nin had written: ‘I realised we can never understand why people love each other, because to the lover they show a side we do not know. It is the lover who operates a transformation and it is to this love we give our fullest self, our fullest gifts. We outsiders never see the enlarged human being who appears in the spotlight of an intense love.’ The reference to RNipples was because Dick had played a cameo role as a policeman in a film called Tank Busters (https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/tank-busters-1970/credits), made for television in 1970 and directed by the late Geoff Murphy, who also took a starring role. In the credits one of the characters is called Ridgid (sic) Nipples. There was much consternation at the national television broadcaster when it was about to go to air because originally Dick was named as Rock Hard Nipples, for some inexplicable reason, and in its wisdom the NZBC made the filmmakers change it. I often remembered Nin’s piece of advice when, from time to time, girlfriends of mine over the years seemed to hook up with unlikely types and I struggled to see the attraction. Then I would remember her wise words about not being able to see the side of the lover that reveals itself only to the other. I collected Nin’s books and read them (and reread them) all over the years. I had just written a fan letter to her in 1977, when I learned that she had died. Her influence started me on a long career of keeping a journal and seeing therapists of my own, which in turn led me to becoming a therapist myself, of the addictions variety. Dick and I made plans to hook up again in Wellington and he gave me his phone number at the library. We both wrote short stories about our three days together in Okarito. He called his ‘From the Store to Here’ and gave it to me several months later. He too had noticed me in the general store and described how a beam of light had picked up the soft fuzz of the hair around my forehead. ‘Bit like a halo,’ he wrote. I called my story simply ‘Dick’ and wrote about how good the mussels tasted and the silver roach clip that I left behind, somewhere in the tangled sheets of Dick’s bed. The year, 1971, when I went to journalism school at Wellington Polytechnic, was a very special year in many ways. I lost my virginity, had my first story published, and got my first pair of Levi’s. I’d been wearing jeans for a while by this stage but they were the uncool brand, Lee’s. There wasn’t a great range available in New Zealand in those days and Mum bought them for me to wear while I was riding my trusty steed, Paladin, a big, grey Arab horse who I loved. I was 18 and I’d left home in South Canterbury for the first time and went to live in Wellington while I studied journalism at Wellington Polytechnic under the careful tutelage of the esteemed Christine Cole-Catley (or simply Chris Cole as she was known then); Michael King, who went on to have an illustrious career as an historian and wasn’t much older than most of us, we learned later; Keith Gunn who’d been the chief sub-editor on the Evening Post for 25 years; Doug McGilvray; and Jim Hartley.
My friend Terence Keane had bought the Levi’s in Hawaii a couple of years earlier (he was so mature, was Terence, and slightly older than I was) and the jeans were already well-worn in. One day we decided to swap jeans to experiment with the fit. Turned out my Lee’s fitted Terence to a T and likewise me with his Levi’s. So I became the proud owner of my first pair of Levi’s and Terence kept my Lee’s. You could only buy Levi’s if you went offshore, and I was yet to venture overseas. So there was a certain status attached to a pair of Levi’s. They weren’t just jeans; they signified a whole lot more. The next day I walked with a slight swagger in to tech, proudly wearing my Levi’s which had a slight flair at the ankle. I bumped into one of our class’s cool surfer types, Graeme Moody. ‘Turn around, Bridget?’ he said. Grinning broadly, I turned around so he could see the all-important leather branded patch on my right hip. I suppose my expectation was that I now I had the cool jeans, they were my entrée to the cool kids. So I was a bit gutted when he said, ‘How did you get those?’ What I took from this was the implication that I was not cool enough to wear a pair of Levi’s. I never really forgave Moods for that slight; I, who so desperately needed to be accepted. I already felt like a square peg in a round hole, being from the South Island. Graeme went on to have a distinguished career in radio news and tragically died one day while he was out surfing when he was in his 50s. I’m not sure if I was wearing Terence’s Levi’s when I visited Jerusalem up the Wanganui River (there was no H in those days) over the Easter break of that memorable year, but probably. Our tutors had directed us to find a news story and write it up. My fellow classmate Derek McCullough’s parents lived in Wanganui and told him that the local council’s health inspector was holding a hearing about Jerusalem. The commune had been set up a couple of years earlier by New Zealand’s pre-eminent poet James K. Baxter who had already been working with drug addicts in his house in Grafton, Auckland. Baxter, being a member of Alcoholics Anonymous knew all about addiction himself. Baxter’s commune nestled within the small Maori community of Hiruharama, the Maori transliteration of Jerusalem. The little community was bordered by a convent run by the Sisters of Compassion and we’d heard that they ministered to the dying, i.e. providing palliative care by giving their patients food containing cannabis. Knowing that instilled in me a new view of compassion. God knows what the nuns thought of Baxter’s motley crew of dope-smoking hippies. The nuns pretty much kept to themselves, and the commune’s residents kept to theirs. There seemed to be no barriers between the commune itself and the nuns’ property, but clearly some boundaries did exist. I hadn’t been to Wanganui before so it was new territory for me and I was looking forward to getting the story like a good little reporter. Apparently, some of the sanitary conditions were not up to scratch at Jerusalem and the good old local council wanted to close the place down. We took a bus up to Wanganui, and stayed a night with Derek’s parents who kindly lent us their EH Holden the next day. We found the council building and in some dusty old chamber sat down to hear what the health inspector had to say about the so-called unsanitary conditions at Jerusalem. Baxter was there, instantly recognisable with his long, whispy grey hair and scraggly beard; the ends of his baggy, ill-fitting trousers rolled up leaving his slightly grubby ankles and bare feet exposed. He was tiny, only about my height (165cm or 5ft 5in) and wearing an old grey jacket which looked the worse for wear – or was it an oilskin parka? much like mine. The oilskin was definitely the jacket of choice for some of us Kiwis in those days. I wore mine for about 20 years until it became very tatty and I left it in a bar somewhere, some time in the 80s. After the hearing, the details of which elude me now, nearly 50 years later, we asked Baxter if he would do an interview. He was pretty adamant that we ‘come up and see for yourselves’, letting us know in no uncertain terms that an interview wouldn’t cut it. We piled into the Holden for the drive up to the fabled commune with the man himself, Hemi, in the navigator’s seat. The place was tucked away and I wondered if we’d have been able to find it without Baxter’s guidance. The three of us walked up a narrow track through long grass and eventually found ourselves at the rag-tag collection of fairly rickety buildings that made up Baxter’s Jerusalem. The main problem from the health inspector’s point of view seemed to be the long drop. This was a type of lavatory that most Kiwis of the day were almost certainly acquainted with. My dad used to dig a long drop every summer holidays when we went camping beside a river on a farm in South Canterbury. It got pretty stinky on a hot day but we tolerated it as being part of a long, hot summer and at the end of the holidays filled it in again. The long drop at Jerusalem was similar and I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. We wandered around and, some time later, Derek decided to go back to Wanganui and then to Wellington. I decided to stay on. I suppose, in a way, I went AWOL. After being there a day or two, the main problem with the place, as far as I was concerned, seemed to be the food situation. At one stage, the kai ran out and we decided to catch eels which lurked under the banks of the Wanganui River, which flowed nearby. They were great eating. We wrapped them in leaves and cooked them over an open fire. Another day someone shot a pig and it tasted pretty darn good as well. The sleeping arrangements were all quite loose. People slept in bunks in one of the houses and no-one seemed to have ownership over any particular space. One of the best places to sleep was the Hobbit Hole. This was basically a bunch of mattresses spread over the bare earth underneath the branches of a tree that drooped all the way down to the ground. It was like a cave and it was truly communal sleeping. Hemi, as everyone called him, slept there too sometimes. We were invited to the Easter Sunday church service in the beautiful little white church that was part of the convent. Baxter gave a moving sermon. It was my first time in a Catholic church and I was impressed. So much so that I swore I’d follow up with more investigation when I got back to Wellington. The family I boarded with in Wellington were Catholics and I was curious about the different belief systems. Baxter’s sermon made a lot of sense to my emerging idea of spirituality, something I pursued off and on for several decades before settling on the idea of a higher power of my own about 12 years ago when I sobered up. A couple of years after graduating from journalism school, I embarked on a half-hearted attempt at a BA and decided, stupidly, to major in English at Victoria University. Dr Frank McKay was my English tutor and became a huge influence on my tiny mind. In the 90s when his biography about Baxter came out, I devoured it and remembered the wise old Catholic priest fondly. One morning after a night’s sleep in the Hobbit Hole, I woke up and in the early light of day I could see though the branches that a mist was draping itself over everything. It was so beautiful, shrouding the surrounding hills, swirling around the little white church, and muting all the greenery. The only sounds I could hear were some birds, starting up their morning sing-song. As I was taking this in, thinking how idyllic it all was and did I really have to leave and go back to Wellington and journalism school, I heard a stirring among the sleepers. I somehow knew it was Hemi and a young woman starting the sounds of early lovemaking. I snuggled back into my sleeping bag and – I’m not sure quite why I said it, but it probably had something to do with feeling uncomfortable about being in such close proximity to sexual activity; I myself was a virgin and unaccustomed to the etiquette of communal fucking – blurted out: ‘Hemi! Say us a poem.’ At which stage the noises stopped and Baxter’s mellifluous voice started to intone ‘Letter to Sam Hunt’. The elder poet reflecting in his inimitable way to the young up-and-coming one. Unfortunately I was unable to get permission to publish the last verse of this now famous poem, but it’s available in several books. It talks about a wily tomcat being a metaphor and that ‘he resembled us, Who may write poems well, with luck, About the dolls we do not fuck’. Baxter wrote the poem in 1968 but it wasn’t published until 1973, posthumously. I turned my head back to the view through the branches and drank it all in, the surreal mist, the famous poet’s glorious voice, reciting a poem, proof of his bond with Hunt. It was not unusual for various inhabitants of the commune to ask Baxter for a poem. But the timing on my side was pretty cheeky. Afterwards, Hemi explained that Hunt had later replied to the poem with his own poem, A Letter to Jerusalem. Just two poets communicating with each other the best way they knew how. In verse.Life at Jerusalem continued in its haphazard way. I have no idea how long I was there, but clearly long enough for my absence to be noted back at journalism school in Wellington and for my parents to be informed. God knows how they did it but word eventually arrived. There was no phone at Jerusalem that I knew of. I remember clearly how it happened. I was walking, on my own, from A to B somewhere along a little track through the long grass, when Hemi appeared around a corner, coming towards me. I was chuffed that he remembered my name.‘Bridget, your parents are worried about you and you’ve got to get back to Wellington.’I shed a tear or two and muttered something about having no money. The sweet man reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a crumpled five dollar note and gave it to me. Five bucks in 1971 was a substantial sum of money. He said he was going in to ‘town’ soon and that he’d hitch in with me. I gathered my few possessions and we set out together on the track out to the road into Wanganui. It wasn’t long before a big truck stopped and we both got in to the cabin. By this stage we’d become quite matey and to me he was just a little, kind man whose wonderful voice I would remember forever.The driver dropped us in Wanganui and Hemi gave me a final hug before I set out on my own for the last leg back to Wellington. For all my rebelliousness, I still knew when to do as I was told or suffer the consequences. My parents never did tell me how they managed to get hold of me. And I never asked.Some months later back in the capital, it was lovely to see Hemi when he arrived one day on campus to speak to us. Afterwards he found me and gave me a big hug. I loved that scruffy little man who smelled of tobacco and BO and whose voice was so calm and gentle. A heart attack killed him the following year when he was only 46.Another literary type who spoke to us in Wellington that year was Sam Hunt. Photo credit: Linda ThompsonThe above is a black-and-white picture of him as he addressed us in our little pre-fab building tucked away on the Wellington Polytechnic campus. Like everyone, it seems, he did so while smoking a cigarette. He gesticulated wildly. I don’t remember the topic of his address, but I do remember the passion of the man. Tall, and wearing and those tight, narrow jeans that he never seemed to change over the years. Then, some time later, a few of us from that class of ’71 visited him at his place, Bottle Creek, near Paremata out of Wellington, and hung out with him for a few hours. I’m not sure how or why this happened, but I’m sure that our much-loved tutor Michael King had something to do with it. Strings must’ve been pulled. Why on earth would anyone want to host a bunch of rowdy students who probably asked stupid questions and just got in the way? I have very little memory of this day, except that it gave me an entrée when I met Hunt again some time in the late ‘90s. A bunch of us were in a pub in Greymouth on the West Coast of the South Island, drinking with Hunt who’d just won some big literary prize and was shouting all the drinks. He was drunk and getting louche, as was his wont. A drunk Hunt was garrulous to a degree that bordered on the boring. I blurted out – and I’m not exactly sure why I did it, except the alternative seemed to be that he would keep raving on – ‘Sam! Say us a poem!’ And without hardly missing a beat, except to clear his throat, Sam, in his lilting, gravelly voice gave us a moving rendition of ‘A Letter to Jerusalem’. On the skyline of the Kaiwhara hills, Gill, a mother to the kids on pills Keeps open house, sends you her love. Johnney too, who may forget to leave For work some mornings in the woolstore Sits drinking in the sun outside the door Tall buildings no bigger than the blocks on the floor, Wellington afloat on the harbour haze . . . You think of how most men spend their days In offices as cramped as elevators – Their wish, to be heading Heavenwards, “Up in the world” to use their words! The law they all ignore, of gravity, My friends at Kaiwhara and I Observe in this old house against the sky . . . The Fall. Whatever. The sun on the sea. Too much of this good life, I’ll go dry! Summer coming, Sylvia and I will sleep Together often in the sun, -- and slip A long way off, a long way from the beat And hurt of words. And wake, carnal with heat. I got round to thinking I’d better reply, I owe you a letter, Old Father Sky, Tell you what I’m up to. I hitch-hiked out This afternoon to Bottle Creek, Could easily have made it with the chick Who picked me up: I’ve little doubt She’d very much fancy a denim lout – A little rougher than her easy-action Husband who fails to bring her on. She went out of her way, drove me right home. I didn’t try. Instead, told her this poem I’m writing down. Did I want to travel? She asked, and nearly slid on the gravel When I told her my only ambition Was to make a perfect act of contrition, And when I grew up, to be a moonshiner Whiskey-mad and bare-back in the hills, And to fart as loud as an ocean-liner. But the world, old cock, is hard on my heels. The truth is, Jim, the Education Board Is gunning me down with a 3-year bond To teach young kids a cursive script As tidy as a row of angels’ holes, To teach the kids that if they have to shit To clean up afterwards and keep clean souls. It’s hard, but there we are! I think by now You’ll have the message strong. I don’t know how, But very soon I’m off outside to join Johnney for a beer . . . and toss a coin Late on some summer afternoon. Whichever way it falls, I’ll see you soon. (A Letter to Jerusalem is published with the kind permission of the author.) |
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