The first time I bought drugs is etched in my mind. I’d been smoking cannabis off and on since I was in my mid-teens: people would sometimes pass around joints at parties or when a group of us was hanging out at the various places we lived in, usually fairly tatty old houses where the furniture was equally ancient and shabby. But I was chuffed the first time it was offered to me as product to purchase. This meant I was trustworthy and clearly part of the scene. I had arrived.

I was drinking watery, low-alcohol beer, the only type available in New Zealand at the time, in my favourite watering hole in downtown Wellington, circa 1972. The Duke of Edinburgh was on the corner of Willis Street, the main street in New Zealand’s capital city, and Manners Street. The old pub was a short walk from home which was a little further up the hill in the Aro Valley. The Duke later became a shopping mall and bore no resemblance to the much-loved pub our crowd used to hang out in. The clientele was an odd mixture of students, musicians, journalists and drug dealers – downstairs – and the more academic, lecturers and grownups, upstairs. I sometimes ventured upstairs but felt more comfortable with the rabble downstairs – although I often used to wonder what my parents would have thought. They were pretty conservative and this lot were not. The carpet at the Duke had clearly been there for many years and emitted a stale scent having absorbed many litres of the amber fluid we used to buy by the jug. Each jug contained a huge amount of beer which we slurped out of heavy 7oz glasses for hours without too many ill effects. Compared with today’s high-alcohol beer, it was weak as piss. So ‘getting on the piss’ was a fairly tame affair. Still, getting ‘pissed and stoned’ was a favourite past-time.

So there I was, minding my own business, having a beer in the late afternoon with my mates and chewing the fat. My intellectual friend Ron, and briefly my boyfriend (they were all brief affairs, my love affairs in those days), was doing what he always did at his regular corner table, rolling very thin rollies, chain smoking them, thinking up words for his crossword and writing them down in pencil.  Ron was probably the most erudite of this scruffy lot and he had a dry sense of humour. I was still relatively new to Wellington, having only just graduated from a year at journalism school at Wellington Polytechnic. I didn’t really feel ‘a part of’ the scene, but the Duke crowd seemed to tolerate me and I was gradually becoming accepted. I had just turned 20 and didn’t even know how to score, so had wondered where everyone else’s dope came from. My friends weren’t exactly what you’d call stoners, in today’s language, but we got on it occasionally and then laughed a lot. The weed was a lot ‘lighter’ then; not the ‘heavy’ skunk that fucks you up these days.

Fitting in was important to me; I desperately wanted to be accepted by this interesting crowd. They were such a diverse bunch and yet we all seemed to have something in common – if only the Duke. No-one questioned why I was there, a young, unemployed news reporter, fresh out of journalism school and yet to find a job. I could walk in on my own, buy a beer and find someone to talk to without too much trouble. So when Frank, aka Frank Prythertch, came over and grabbed my arm with his huge paw, saying: ‘Come with me,’ I went along quite meekly, intrigued. I wasn’t sure where we were going or why, but I suspected it had something to do with drugs. Frank was about the most notorious Duke habitue. His battle-scarred face featured a very crooked nose, the result I presumed from being broken more than once. He had a scraggly moustache and a way with words. He was huge, well over 6.2 and built like a brick shithouse. We’d had the odd conversation before this momentous occasion and I knew he sold the odd bit of dope. He knew lots of the other public bar regulars and was always there, propped up at one of the round, high tables, sitting on a tall bar stool. No comfortable seating arrangements downstairs at the Duke.

Directly opposite the Duke over the other side of Wills Street and up some steep steps on Boulcott Street was St Mary of the Angels, a Catholic church, a large grey, glowering stone structure.  We seemed to be headed in the direction of this holy monument. Frank was muttering something incomprehensible – he was fairly drunk – and I was up for an adventure, so didn’t question him and was just impaired enough to let my defences down. I’d never been inside a Catholic church before and felt slightly intimidated by the opulence of it all, the high vaulted ceiling, the ornate décor, the scent of incense and a huge bank of candles that bathed the hushed surroundings in a golden glow. We were the only people inside the cavernous place. Frank was intent on something and, staggering slightly, ushered me all the way up the aisle to the front-row pew and knelt down. He bowed his head, seemingly in prayer. Being a newly emerging atheist, I refused to kneel and sat beside him. After taking in my surroundings, I noticed that fact he was rolling a joint, head bowed and muttering what I thought might be some obscure Catholic prayer. I couldn’t make it out.

I became mute with fear. The cannabis was spilling all over the place, scattering on the marble floor. I offered up a little prayer of my own, despite my own nascent belief system, that no harm would come our way. It was a big fat clumsy joint, rolled with all the drunken precision Frank could muster at the time.

‘Come on,’ he mumbled, grabbing me by the arm again and leading me out. We nearly reached a side exit, when Frank asked me if I had a light. I didn’t. ‘Hold on then,’ he said and stumbled back inside to the bank of smoking candles. Fuck me if he wasn’t going to light a joint inside the church. Clouds of cannabis smoke started billowing around Frank’s head as he bent over the candles, torching the spliff right there to the right of the aisle, right there at the front of the rows of, luckily, empty pews. As he came shuffling towards me, waving the lit joint to extinguish the flame, Frank wore a lopsided grin on his battered face. I saw the scene as if I were in a Fellini film. Girl, just out of her teens, in her best faded blue jeans with dark curly hair framing a bewildered face. Was this really happening? This was too weird and dangerous. Slightly older, large lumbering man with plate-like hands and scruffy clothes, wearing workman’s boots, puffing furiously on a spliff, emitting more clouds of smoke. By now the familiar aromatic smell was wafting my way.

We sat on a low concrete wall, leaning against the larger wall of the church. Frank passed the joint to me and I took a drag, relieved at what we’d just gotten away with. The THC was starting to kick in and I took big lung-fulls of the sweet smoke. My fear was beginning to subside when around the corner, about 20m away, appeared a clergyman, putting his head through a flowing a white vestment. He was walking briskly towards the entrance we had just exited. He was clearly on his way in to the church to perform some mick ministry. I was hoping that he didn’t notice us.
No such luck.

‘Father!’ bellowed Frank. The young cleric – he didn’t seem much older than us – looked up, seeing us for the first time. I was horrified as he changed direction and came towards us. Fuck, I thought, this isn’t going to go well. ‘Father!’ said Frank again, redundantly, because the man of God was clearly about to engage with us. By this stage I was completely out of it and struck dumb.
‘Here, Father, try some of this,’ said Frank, waving the half-smoked joint at the approaching priest. Oh God; I was mortified. He was offering drugs to a holy guy. I tried to shrink into the ground.
‘No thanks,’ said the cleric in a good-natured way. Jesus, the man was a saint. I half expected him to call the cops. But Frank persisted, saying, ‘What do you think of drugs, Father?’ This was getting worse. Not only was he trying to push drugs onto the unsuspecting priest, he wanted to engage him in conversation about drugs!

I giggled nervously.

‘I don’t condemn drugs and I don’t condone them,’ said the priest. ‘Well then, Father,’ said Frank and from side on I saw his eyes crinkle with a mischievous look as he eyeballed the cleric. My skin crawled with fear. What the fuck was going on?
‘Give us your blessing.’
It wasn’t a polite request. It was a command. I guessed it was some kind of Catholic thing. I’d never been blessed before; didn’t even know such a thing was possible.

Without missing a beat, the poor priest started to intone a prayer, blessing each of us in turn, at the same time making that familiar gesture of the cross with his right hand.

‘And now if you’ll excuse me, I need to hear confession.’

And he turned, heading off on his original mission, a billowing white cloud of surplice over his flowing black cassock. Even Frank was speechless. I’d never heard such a statement – the priest’s condone/condemn thing. The dude didn’t have an opinion one way or another. I thought people were either for drugs or against them. The thought that there could be a middle ground was a whole new concept for me. My 20-year-old drug-addled mind simply boggled.

We finished the joint off, not saying much, pondering what had just happened and wondering if this was what it felt like to be blessed. Eventually we clambered to our slightly unsteady feet and as we made our bedraggled way back down the path in the church grounds, Frank pulled out a bag of the green stuff, saying, ‘Here you are: that’ll be 10 bucks.’ It was my first drug transaction and I was chuffed. I was in with the Duke crowd now. I handed over my money feeling proud that I’d accomplished such a thing. Later, smoking it with my flatmates at home, it didn’t seem to have the same effect. I wondered if it was because the circumstances weren’t so extraordinary.

About 25 years later, after the Duke had long been a mall, we were having a Duke reunion at another bar in Wellington – and there was Frank. He was alone, slumped over at a corner table, propping himself up, a meaty hand holding up a heavy head, nodding off, looking very out of it. Eventually I made my way over to him and asked if he was OK. He roused himself out of a deep torpor and, peering at me through very bloodshot eyes, said, ‘I thought I’d have a taste [ie inject himself with small quantity of heroin] to remember the good old days.’

Then Frank blearily nodded off again. He was a mess. I pondered on his motivation; he seemed to be missing out on the celebratory nature of the occasion – here we all were again, gathered together to remember our beloved pub. The same crowd, now all a little older and wiser (or not) and having fun catching up and laughing at our old antics.

Then he stirred, seeming to remember something, and lifting his head again, said: ‘Oh, and by the way, that stuff I sold you at the church was cabbage.’

It didn’t put me off though, and I went on to have an illustrious association with drugs. Around that time, my mother pointed out some story in a newspaper that talked about how kids were ‘experimenting with drugs’. I didn’t say it at the time, but I thought: ‘We weren’t experimenting – we knew exactly what we were doing.’
​
It only took me about 30-odd years to sober up and get clean.

Blog 5
29/12/17
 
I’ve read up a fair bit on dating. The books are inevitably written by Americans and, I presume, for the American market. They don’t really take into account the laissez-faire way we Kiwis go about dating. I met my erstwhile husband because we were part of the same tribe and we all used to hang out in the same pubs in Wellington in those days and dating just wasn’t part of our culture.
A few years ago I tried, disastrously, to do the dating thing, and the one guy I picked on about my third go turned out to be, well, let’s just call it a mistake. So, licked my wounds and I went back in my cave. This time, fast forward several years later to 2017, I felt more confident after learning about healthy boundaries, I launched myself onto a dating site for older people.
 
The first man was perfect! I wanted to marry him and have his babies immediately. We had a few texts afterwards and he said he was going away for the long weekend and would contact me when he got back. He didn’t. Then I noticed on the site that he’d moved down country. He just disappeared. A new word entered my lexicon: ghosting.
 
The next guy seemed decent enough, but didn’t show up for our second date and when I texted him wondering if he was on his way, he had some bullshit excuse about his daughter taking the car. I pondered why he didn’t let me know earlier, and just put it down to bad manners. A long time ago a very dear friend said I should let go of certain expectations when it came to manners. I’ve been working on that, but being a greenhorn in the dating biz I was slightly miffed. It just didn’t make sense to me.
 
I could see that this wasn’t going to be a quick fix by this stage. Then I heard the learned Dr Stephanie Carnes say that dating ‘is a numbers game’. OK, I thought, so this is going to test my patience. But somehow I still thought that Mr Right was just around the corner and sadly the next few dates came and went without much spark at all.
 
Another guy, about date four or five, was ‘very surprised’ to hear from me asking for a second date. All the books say before you make a decision at least have a second date, and I thought I was doing the right thing. So, I left him alone and sent a text saying I was ‘sorry it didn’t work out’ and wished him well.
 
I tried another old people’s dating website and had absolutely no luck at all. By this stage I noticed a pattern emerging. Most of the men just wanted to chat by text messaging. It was a clunky system and not very user-friendly. When I suggested a date they’d either go all quiet and not reply at all or make up some lame excuse. I was trying not to take it personally. The ‘sorry it didn’t work out’ phrase became a regular thing.
 
I consulted a colleague who’d been dating up a storm and who wisely explained that there are many different reasons for people to use so-called ‘dating’ websites, and one of them was that some people simply want to chat by messaging. Not actually go on dates at all. She pointed me to some research which did, in fact, prove this to be a fact. The word ‘dating’ began to take on a whole new meaning. One guy who was based in Long Island suggested we become ‘an internet couple’. I was astonished and it took some effort to reply politely and give him the flick gently.
 
I’d heard about Tinder a while back and thought it was just a hook-up site, but apparently, no – some people actually use it for dating and some even end up in normal relationships. I set out, once again, writing a new profile and posting some pics in which I didn’t look too bad. And made the point that I wasn’t into hook-ups and was looking for a long-term relationship. Almost immediately an extremely handsome man popped up saying he was newly back in the country and looking for a long-term thing. The first date went well, although I had to work quite hard to get him to come to my neck of the woods; he wanted a picnic in the park and I wasn’t sure I could make a quick exit in the middle of a park if need be. I was somewhat surprised when I received a love poem a day or so later and wondered if it was about me. The last line was something like ‘I fell for you’. The second date with him involved going to a market and wandering around, then a coffee afterwards. It went well. Then again, the ghosting thing. After a week went by I texted him to say that I was glad he’d shown his hand early and sorry it didn’t work out. No reply.
 
The good thing about Tinder is that it gives you a distance in kilometres between Auckland and wherever the other person is. So, for example, a guy in California is about 12,000km away. If that’s the case I press the red cross button immediately. However, another strange thing started emerging. Several men were presented as 3km away but when I asked where they were based, they all were inevitably back in the US having just been to Auckland for business. One in particular became very engaged, often sending me loads of hearts which drifted up the screen, all red and seemingly very heartfelt. I even sent a couple myself, to my surprise. Then he went and ruined everything by asking for money, saying ‘I’ll be indebted to you for the rest of my life’. This, after flattering the hell out of me. I sent the ‘sorry it didn’t work out’ message and there was no reply. Over the years I’ve read several stories about people being scammed into sending money. Did he really think I was that stupid? Especially after telling me how smart I was . . .
 
The other pattern I’m noticing is that the 3km guys who’ve all recently been to Auckland for ‘business’ are all planning to return ‘for good’. So enchanted with the place, they swear they’re making plans to emigrate. That was the case with California Man as well. Several men say things like ‘distance is no barrier where the heart is concerned’. How a person is supposed to create a dinkum relationship by texting or making phonecalls or even Skyping seems to be something of a long-shot, methinks. All I see are lines on a screen – the rest is fantasy. I feel strongly about this and I know for a fact that it can lead to disastrous results. Our brains tend to make shit up if there’s no tangible evidence to look at; body language is all.
 
So, my self-improvement work on boundaries is proving to be very helpful. If they want my phone number I simply say I’ll give it out after date #2 if we get to that stage. If they want to Skype because they’re 12,000km away, I say ‘Look me up next time you’re in Auckland and let’s get coffee’.
 
​Yesterday I read that Barack Obama, in a thinly veiled reference to #45’s fondness for tweeting, made a plea for people to return to talking to each other rather than texting. I felt a little bit better then about wanting to date the old-fashioned way.
 

Blog4
On boundaries
In my first blog on vulnerability I said that I might write about boundaries at some stage. So here we are (and by the way, the test I had that day when I was feeling so vulnerable worked out just fine. I don’t have the calcium build-up in my arteries after all so I can stop taking the dreaded statins. My mood improved almost immediately).
So anyway, boundaries. I really didn’t even know there was such a thing until relatively recently; say in the last 10 years. I heard the word bandied about the place and wasn’t sure what I knew about boundaries until one day a woman I was working with stopped doing a task for me that she’d been doing for a while. I mentioned this to one of my colleagues who said straight off, ‘Oh, yes, Jane has good boundaries.’ Just because Jane had offered to help with this task one day, she did encourage me to watch her do it so I could learn to do it myself. And then she stopped. THAT was Jane putting her boundary in place so that when I asked her to do the task again, she insisted that I should know how to do it myself, and the upshot was that I simply had to take responsibility for the task myself.
I’m still learning about boundaries, so the following is partially taken from the website of Codependents Anonymous, a fellowship for men and women whose lives have been negatively affected by their codependence.
In co-dependent families, where we learn our codependence, boundaries are never the same from one day to the next. Sometimes there are no boundaries at all. Doors are left open when they should be closed and people wander around naked. In the process we lose the innate sense of what is rightfully ours – our personal integrity – sometimes mistaking a lack of boundaries for love or caring behaviour.
People whose boundaries are lacking often can’t say no because they don’t have a sense of who they are; they become people pleasers and don’t have a clear sense of what’s right and what’s wrong.
One of the main ways a person can have a boundary violated is when they have their feelings violated. (Actually, even knowing what a feeling is in the first place can be part of the problem.)  Emotional boundary violation happens when someone ‘puts down’ or discounts our emotions or feelings, indicating they’re unimportant, unnecessary or wrong. ‘Stop crying!’ or ‘Pull yourself together!’ or that great New Zealand expression ‘Harden up!’ And in the process of ignoring how we are feeling, that other person is often trying to spare us from feeling our own anger, pain, fear, guilt, joy, sadness or shame. Emotions are not wrong or bad – they just are. We need to experience our full range of feelings otherwise they can come out sideways and that can be painful. For everyone.
As I learn more about boundaries, I’ll write more on this subject. I remember one of our journalism tutors, the late great Michael King, saying the best way to learn is to teach. I became a jack of many trades as a journalist, researching subjects and then writing about them. So, in a way, I’m still doing that. Investigating new subjects that interest me and writing them out. It’s a cathartic process.
 

I was studying for a year in Minnesota when the global financial crisis struck. It was in the middle of the winter in early 2009 and I’m thinking ‘I’m just an insignificant little Kiwi sheila; it’s not going to affect me’. Before I left home, I’d done all my sums over and over and finally figured out I could support myself for a year by renting out my apartment in Auckland, New Zealand. Everything was going just fine and I thought I’d be spared. World financial crisis, what world financial crisis? And then the Kiwi dollar started to fall. And it kept falling. And finally it tanked at around 42 US cents to the Kiwi. The amount I was receiving in greenbacks was insignificant. I started to panic. I really sweated it. My anxiety reached alarming levels and I didn’t know what to do. Then I heard a quiet little voice inside me that I’d been coming to acknowledge as my Higher Power (being about three years into my recovery from alcohol and other drugs), and I took notice of this quiet little voice which was encouraging me to go to a meeting.
It was about 20 below outside and the roads were very icy and there was snow everywhere. It was a Saturday morning, I remember, as I got in my trusty little old Chevy that I leased for $US50 per week (I couldn’t afford to buy a car outright, even though they were cheap as chips in MN compared with back home). And driving on the wrong side of the road, I made my way across the border into Wisconsin where there was an AA meeting I’d been to a few times before.
It was a big meeting and after the preamble, the chairperson announced that this was a topic meeting and, guess what?, the topic was ‘letting go of fear of financial insecurity’. I was gobsmacked. I was also very anxious and could feel that tears weren’t far away. We broke into smaller groups and spread out through the big old house that some grateful person had left to AA. There were about six of us in my wee group, a mixed bag of men and women, none of whom I knew at all. When it came my turn to share I got a bit teary explaining that my own fear of financial insecurity was deeply rooted. Both of my parents lived through the Great Depression and they passed on to us kids a respect for money that for me turned into fear. I made up in my tiny mind that most things dysfunctional stemmed somehow from filthy lucre. For instance, my first experience of seeing a friend’s family torn apart by divorce, to me started with the fact they were wealthy . . . I translated their big house into ‘they must be rich’ and therefore when their divorce happened I somehow came to the conclusion that it was because they had pots of money. Or perhaps an offhand remark by my mother became translated into ‘money makes you unhappy’.
So, anyway, there I was in a Minnesotan winter and while the snow fell outside, I sat beside a stranger on a big old sofa and cried as I told my story about being caught up in this WFC and how I was worried that I might not be able to stay to finish my studies because I my funds were so limited. Fresh food in winter in Minnesota gets very expensive because it has to be brought in from far-away warmer states. I remember paying $US7 for a cauliflower.
I got lots of hugs and warm wishes from my fellows and drove back through the wintery landscape where the lakes freeze to such a depth you can drive a truck on them. The message I got from the reading at the start of the meeting, and other people’s sharing, was that I had to let go of the need to control my own financial crisis. No amount of white-knuckling it was going to change what was happening. I kept hearing the names Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and it seemed to be their fault somehow. Eventually I looked up these names and figured out the whole thing started with greed and dodgy financial deals to do with mortgages. People all over America were losing their homes as a result.
I turned on my laptop when I got back to my little basement flat and found an email sitting in my inbox from some people back home who wanted me to edit a book. I chuckled to myself. OK, God, I thought, I’ll play your little game. I was already working a 70-hour week, what with attending lectures as well as working as an intern at a big treatment centre. I found the time to edit the book and got $NZ50 an hour for my troubles. It was a help, but more than anything, I began to understand that if I did the next right thing, things may just work out.
I wrote to a mate back home, asking if he could help somehow, not really believing anything would come of it. But a couple of weeks went by and I got an email from him saying the Guardian Trust had granted me $NZ18,000! I was gobsmacked and immediately wrote to this charitable trust in Auckland to thank them. I remember wondering what I could do to celebrate and went to one of the upmarket grocery stores and bought myself a very expensive jar of English marmalade. Americans don’t really go in for this delicacy and I was missing it bigtime.
The grad school where I was training announced that in the third and final semester we had to find ourselves an internship. Luckily, I had a Kiwi connection with a very good treatment centre in Minneapolis and took a risk and asked if I could live in as well as working as an intern. These warm-hearted Minnesotans welcomed me with open arms and I spent three months there. This included a very happy Christmas and New Year living with a group of women who were in for treatment for their alcohol and other drug problems. I had a ball and got fed three times a day. The treatment centre’s kind chef would even pack me a lunch to take to school each day.
I came back to NZ with a certificate in addiction studies, a new career, and a very small debt.
​

​I went for a walk this morning. Part of it went past some high-rise buildings within the University of Auckland. And as I looked up I could see a naked female sitting on a window ledge inside her apartment. She was a beautiful sight; very Venus de Milo. I thought about waving because I could see she was looking down at me. She stayed put resolutely, not seeming to care about who could see her pale nakedness. And it got me to thinking about all the times I was naked in public.
I reckon I was New Zealand’s first female streaker – well, my accomplice, whose name I’ve forgotten, and I. It was in the middle of winter and we had mates in a band who got a gig in Fairlie, in South Canterbury, NZ, circa 1972, and we went along because we had nothing better to do on a Saturday night. There was definitely alcohol involved. We were a little bored standing in the wings of the stage, watching our mates play to a fairly typical South Canterbury crowd – bit rowdy, bit drunk, but having raucous fun, waving their arms around and drinking, probably out of large bottles of beer. I said to my friend words to the effect of ‘Let’s take off all our clothes and run across the stage.’ Within seconds I was naked except for a colourful pair of rugby socks that came up nearly to my knees. I led the charge. We tore  across the stage in front of the band, and looking down, seeing the astonished faces of people at the front of the crowd. Like those clowns at the shows of the time, mouth open and turning as we went by. It felt just a little bit scary. Talk about vulnerable. I’m sure I would never have done it sober. We got to the other side, and realised our clothes were still where we’d left them, so, back we went again, and giggling helplessly, put our clothes on again. I felt exhilarated and a little bit proud of myself.
The Great Ngaruawahia music festival the following year, 1973, was the scene of another very public naked incident which actually went on to have far-reaching repercussions. I'm not saying the picture of me naked in the Sunday News changed the law, but it was part of a court case. The police, in their wisdom, decided to press charges against the paper for publishing indecent documents.
Anyway, there we were, a bunch of us camping in a crowded tent. It was extremely hot and loads of people had got their kit off. We had just smoked a joint in the stifling tent and decided to go for a swim in the nearby Waikato River. The wide, sprawling body of water was cool and inviting. A few willow trees draped over the shallows gave us a nice shaded spot to splash about in. We were feeling fine and I was practicing my diving technique off a partially submerged tree trunk when a photographer appeared on the bank. He was fully clothed and had a decent stills camera draped around his neck.
‘Hello, I’m from the Sunday News. OK if I take a photo of you?’ he politely asked. At that stage I was standing waist deep in the water.
‘Only if you get naked too,’ I shot back.
He stripped to his Jockeys and waded into the water. The man was clearly prepared to suffer for his art, I thought, and went back to diving off the submerged log, backlit by the fierce sun. When the paper came out a couple of days later it published pages of pictures of naked people, including one of a gorgeous hippy girl walking toward the camera completely naked. She had long blonde hair and a great pair of breasts. But for some strange reason the editor had placed a big X over her pubic region. The main pic on the front page was of Corben Simpson, the lead singer for Blerta, seated on a stool with his guitar over his genitalia, grinning at the camera.
The pic of me turned out to be quite an arty shot, diving into the water, side on to the camera. Because the sun was behind me, I was nearly in silhouette – but you could tell I was in the nick. The photographer asked for my details, which I happily provided because he’d been such a good sport and worked hard to get his pic. His caption read something like: Wellington journalist Bridget Wilson cools off in the Waikato River.
Months later when I turned up for work on my first day at the New Zealand Press Association in Wellington, there was my picture pinned to the newsroom noticeboard. A couple of my new colleagues gently ribbed me about the pic, but they all acknowledged it was a good shot.
A couple of months went by and one day I got a call from a lawyer who was representing the Sunday News. It wasn’t hard to track me down, given the caption. My colleagues and I were outraged that the police could have such a conservative attitude to nudity.
The lawyer asked me if I would be willing to be a witness in the case. It was coming to court in a couple of months’ time. I said I’d think about it and rang an older journalist friend.
He said: ‘Don’t be silly. You don’t want to be a martyr to the cause of nudity. But write something instead.’
So I spent an evening writing out what I thought was a well-reasoned piece about my thoughts on nudity. I talked about how I’d grown up in a family where being naked was fine. I wrote about the sheer heat of that day back on the banks of the Wanganui River. And I typed it out on my trusty Remington typewriter on copy paper and handed it over to the lawyer.
When the case came to court, I went along and sat in the back of the room and was chuffed to hear the lawyer read my words to the magistrate. I was even more chuffed when the police lost the case – something about the X over the hippy girl’s pudendum, mainly – and the law was able to be changed.
The other day my erstwhile husband Peter, an acclaimed cinematographer, sent me a 20-second clip of some footage he’d shot of me some time in the mid-70s. He’d set it to that classic striptease music. There I am, all full of joy and probably quite a lot of alcohol, standing front on to Peter’s film camera, somewhere on the Otago Peninsular. All of a sudden I rip off my sundress to reveal a naked body, and making like a stripper, I start to wiggle and fling my arms up in the air like I just don’t care. It’s a joyful 20 seconds of pure, unadulterated glee and no sign of any sense of inhibition at all. I laughed out loud and emailed Peter telling him it had made my day. I didn’t remember the occasion at all. I’m considering showing it at my funeral.
​

I’ve been thinking a lot about vulnerability lately. A while ago I learned that it was a Good Thing. This was in direct contrast to my upbringing; I was raised by pretty strict parents who in turn had been raised by their Victorian parents. The Victorians weren’t really known for being touchy feely and in fact disavowed showing feelings or emotions of any kind. Feelings were actively discouraged as a sign of weakness. To be strong and in control at any given time was a must. When I went to my first tangi or hung out with Europeans in Europe, I felt a faint tinge of envy at seeing a complete lack of inhibition. These people seemed to lack the embarrassment gene, I thought. Same with Americans: they didn’t seem to show any sign of self-consciousness at all and would blurt out quite intimate things to perfect strangers.
So coming to learn that vulnerability was good was somewhat counter-intuitive to me. US researcher Brene Brown talks about vulnerability in one of her Ted talks. She’s bigtime so she knows what she’s talking about (https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability).
And so there I was this morning wearing a not-very-fetching blue polyester V-neck T-Shirt with nothing on underneath (I got to keep my long pants and knickers on, luckily) i.e. bra-less in the radiography department of Ascot Hospital, here in Auckland, New Zealand, pretending that everything was normal while a male radiographer told me all about the procedure I was about to undergo. I noticed I was vulnerable because I was holding my hands, with elbows bent, in front of me, protecting the nipple region. Usually there’s another layer, i.e. the fabric of my bra, between me and a total stranger. So in the absence of that layer my slightly nervous hands did the job. Sort of. Feeling exposed like that in strange surroundings – ie a CT scan room – was very odd and slightly unnerving. The radiographer, a nice, 40-something chap, with greying hair and a rather bushy moustache, was doing all the talking. Then he asked me if I’d had a CT scan before.
‘Is it the noisy one?’ I ventured, having a stab at it, really, because I was pretty sure I hadn’t had a CT scan in the past.
‘No’, he replied, gently, in a way that didn’t leave me feeling ashamed of not having the Right Answer.
‘That’s an MRI.’
Which I kind of knew, having had an MRI about a year ago for a dodgy knee. However, having been a journo for years and years, I am not the slightest bit afraid of asking silly questions. Then he went into quite a long explanation of what the scan was about. Something about finding if I have some kind of crusty build-up in my arteries which can lead to heart disease. Of which my family, on both sides, has much experience. Probably the reason I’m here in the first place. And to see if I need to keep taking a medication called statins, which I don’t care about much because I don’t seem to get all the yucky side effects that others complain about. Then it occurred to me that his spiel was to justify the $330 I would be stung with afterwards. Poor bastard probably gives this spiel 20 times a day, I thought. And the least I could do was listen even though I wished he’d just get on with the job so I could get out of there and home for a cup of tea; tea being the only stimulant I ingest these day, and I had missed my first of the day because it contained caffeine, something I’d been told to avoid 24 hours before the scan (god knows why).
If the scans shows that I don’t have the artery-clogging stuff I’m at less risk of heart disease and I can stop taking the statins. The nice radiographer said it was important to have this ‘warrant of fitness’. Nice analogy, I thought.
I got up on the bed thing and lay down and he asked me what kind of work I did. ‘Addictions counsellor,’ says me. ‘Oh, that’s important work,’ he said and then launched into a story about a mate of his who had a drinking problem, who had died at the tender age of 50-something. At least it distracted me from the anxiety of not really knowing what was about to happen. I still had no idea, although it looked as if the bed was going to slide through an X-ray-looking type of contraption. He asked me to reach my hands above my head and hold them there, presumably so the scanning device could get a clear shot at my heart and its environs. This definitely brought on more vulnerability – i.e. there was now only one layer of layer in front of my breasts, but at least he wasn’t standing in front of me; just a huge curve of steel, a piece of machinery labelled Phillips that arched over me, lying powerless, waiting for the invisible CT rays to zap my arteries, probing for the deadly crusty substance while a computer-speak voice told me when to hold my breath and when to breathe again. I did as I was told and kept perfectly still, as instructed.
I didn’t tell the radiographer about my sense of vulnerability today, but I thought I’d just jot down some notes and see if I could figure something out in the process. If I had been truly authentic, I might’ve said something about feeling a bit anxious, but perhaps my slightly fidgety hands-as-barrier-over-naked-breasts carry-on was a clue. That’s not the point, though, is it? The point of vulnerability is to actually name it. But it’d be a bit daft, right? to say something like: ‘I feel anxious when I’m with a man I’ve just met [albeit a professional, in this case], standing half naked at arm’s length, because I can’t control this situation and I’m not sure whether I can trust you’. But that’s about the length and breadth of it. And even though I hate wearing bras, there’s something inherently trustworthy about encasing one’s breasts in a bra because societal norm dictates the shape of a bosom. And swinging proud and free ain’t it . . .
Brene Brown says the purpose of vulnerability is that we feel closer to one another when we get vulnerable. But that’s when boundaries come into play (something else I’ve been investigating recently and perhaps the subject of another blog). Maybe if the radiographer had been a woman, I would’ve felt more inclined to open up. But then again I wouldn’t have felt so vulnerable with a female radiographer doing the scan.
Anyway, I felt much better striding off to the carpark with my bra on again, the requisite two layers of defence against the elements, while giving me a secure feeling, wearing my best black woollen jumper which almost kept out the chills of a particularly chilly spring day.
11/9/17