Object Dart

How my father fell completely out of society remains much of a mystery to this day. After his departure from Tokomaru Bay in what must have been very early ‘72 he appears to have returned to Auckland and continued to seek help with his illness, but in a society completely unprepared for the type of rehabilitation he required.

New Zealand in the early ’70s was, like many of its contemporaries, still uncertain whether drug addiction was a health or criminal issue, and from what records I’ve been able to secure it was to the attention of both these types of authority that my father was brought. You can imagine then the shame of his parents, your stereotypical hard-working suburban family, who found itself in possession of a son unable to pull himself together.

My earliest inquiry into the period between the East Coast and his death resulted in an interesting titbit of information that has taken a number of years to slot into meaning. Some time in mid-to-late ‘72 the mother of a friend of Howard’s came home to find him sitting on the couch in her lounge. Surprised to find him there, she did not give him a particularly warm welcome (as you would expect), and he left, in what I myself see as another incident of running away.

I always interpreted this encounter as a plea for help, and more recent discoveries in official documents have confirmed this for me. Howard apparently got on well with his friend’s mum, and it was probably to her that he was attempting to turn, in an effort to find some sort of comfort the rebellion against my grandparents precluded.

It is a pattern I have seen several times among personal contacts with heavy drug dependence, a spiral downwards into increasingly anti-social behaviour while also clinging desperately to the normality and safety of society itself. For many this hypocrisy strikes very deeply, and is key to their inability to ‘pull themself together’; a counter-veiling force acting to distance them from the ones they love, while simultaneously increasing the yearning for succour. And so their psyche sheers, often irreparably.

For this reason I now know what he must have been experiencing when taken off a train in Putaruru in May 1972. He is wandering the North Island, seeking who knows what, perhaps Jerusalem and Baxter who has helped others, perhaps nothing more than comfort in the distance from home. He is drunk and in a ritalin stupour, so the guards remove him and hand him to the police. The police in turn hand him to Tokanui Mental Hospital, and it is there than another chapter of his rehabilitation begins, in a place many now speak of with hushed tones. He is sick, covered in tracks, emaciated, alone, lost. A specimen under a benevolent gaze.

F,FLP

Well my boy, I’ve been writing this history, your history, since before I knew you. Actually, since just slightly before I knew of you, and I’ve kept in mind that there will come a day when you will read these many dreamed pages yourself, and wonder.

For me you’ve become something of a lodestone within this tale, it’s unravelling, and my understanding of the many whys it has helped me understand. And pivotal to that understanding is the question, why did he leave?

I know for certain now that discovering the fact of my Father’s demise in the years I first thought I needed to return to his family would have been a mistake, and too much information for my young mind to assimilate. While the plasticity of youth is a boon, it also offers opportunity for partial knowing to deeply gouge rows into which future misunderstanding is sown, the crop of adulthood become a weed.

Sitting here experiencing the gentle frustration of the adult with a child who will not sleep, I have wondered many times how I would cope had I a monkey on my back, and it is that single thought that has many times explained to me the why.

To find yourself sick, but tied to a family you did not expect, with a woman you would barely have known, would be impossible. Knowing that fact makes it easy to not blame him for leaving, and more importantly, to not blame myself. But the teenager? It is a very different knowing.

But my aunt with whom he lived, and my mother herself, were teenagers, the effect of his departure into the unknown and what became the very last time either of them saw him, was profound. My aunt laid the finger of blame on my mother I know, but in the confusion who can be certain.

My mother’s last memory of my father is his making his way along the road away from the house, abandoning them all. My aunt stands on the street, yelling, telling him to never return if he makes the choice to leave. My mother moved away from her too shortly thereafter, herself making a fateful decision.

I see this time now as the harrowing of paradise. The last glimmer in the illusion of peace my Boomers held onto, and it is an important part of our history. Their falling away from each other after the discovery that nothing was easy, and that they themselves were the greatest enemies of peace, must have been profound.

Thinking all this does not make the burden of knowledge any less my boy, but the gift you have given me, unwittingly, is the experience to see with clarity, and is something you should know I will long be grateful for.

F,FLP

Having only approached my Father’s family in my early twenties, I have found myself lightly equipped with small amounts of information about his full tale. Not wanting to further disturb an uneasily resting memory, and finding myself having a considerable degree of difficultly assimilating the details I did have, the bandage has been slowly removed over the last (near-) twenty years.

In large part the long duration of this tale and it’s unfolding, layer by layer, has been a ploy to enable the exposure to air of each small part of the greater wound to heal, or at least dry, before the next small cut can be revealed. But such is the way with writing histories of many living persons. There are many tales I would recall but for my conscience of the ripples the telling would cause. As I say, such is the way.

As a consequence, the discovery of details pertaining to the last few months of my Father’s life have been difficult. My understanding is that he found himself in a slipping downward, and was seeking a way off the heights upon which he found himself, a problem to which anyone who has experienced the noose of addiction will relate.

It was a time when surveillance of youth, and drug users in particular, had become a concern to Auckland Police, and early efforts were being made to ‘combat’ what was understood as the seamier side of the counter-culture (although, truth be told, to comfortable middle-class New Zealand the entire culture was pretty seamy).  And with surveillance comes intervention, and to 70s New Zealand intervention meant institutionalisation.

My impression then is, that in an effort to escape Auckland and his life there, my Father followed his younger sister to the East Coast, a place these days far from everything, but then a complete world away. And so it was that when my Mother returned from Australia my paternal Grandfather was enlisted to drive her from the airport, to collect me, and we joined him in early 1972, Tokomaru Bay.

In a confession made many years ago my Grandfather admitted that he was dubious about the likelihood that I was his grandson, but being the man of his generation he is, he did the right thing and drove back to the Coast, itself something like a return journey for him – his family having farmed the country before the Depression. I imagine he must have driven from Auckland, to Te Aroha to collect me, and from there to Tokomaru Bay, a drive of perhaps 10 hours on some of the worst roads in New Zealand, with a complete stranger.

I’ve often wondered what they spoke about, my Mother and he, assuming they spoke at all. My own recollection of what it was to be a young adult leaves no doubt that the gulf between them would have been enormous, the generational difference likely insurmountable. And in turn, he would have arrived in Tokomaru Bay to find the same gulf between himself and two of his children, themselves living the idealised life of the flower-powered, turned on, and tuned in, long since dropped out.

F,FLP

Back when I thought I might try to string this story together, an effort to understand a history and unravel my own subconscious both, I approached my mother and asked her permission. Whether she knew the depths of our joint past to which I would plumb is questionable, but she must have had an inkling, because she gave me a story of which I was completely unaware, and was a considerable surprise to me. A shot across the bow, as it were.

When we returned from Greece I remember living in another now long-demolished bach in what is today ‘downtown’ Mount Maunganui. It was a couple of street across from my grandparents, and it was one of those halcyon summers you remember as a child. Apparently this story started there.

For some reason we had moved from that place, which was ‘close to the action’ as it were, to Arataki – the suburb I would spend the remainder of my childhood. Arataki was the edge of the world in Mount Maunganui, with lots of state housing, and the general appearance of what they call these days ‘nappy valley’. The skies had circled to the near-perpetual grey of a New Zealand winter, and we were sharing a place with some other people. To this day I don’t remember who they are. But I do remember it being the place that my youngest brother took his first steps.

One of my most keen memories of that house is many adults turning up one day, and everybody disappearing into a back room. The lesson I took away being that children see far more than you might realise, and are more keenly aware of adult behaviour that you might expect. I knew then, as I knew as early as age five, the something specific involved in their secrecy.

From that place, we moved to what became our home until the late 1990s, a state house on the very edge of town, although these days it is buried in wealthy suburbia.

So why all this moving, I hear you ask. Well, it seems that my mother had become involved in some sort of Police investigation into the explicable adult behaviour I had mentioned. Her role has long been something to which she has admitted limited liability, but her tale to me (the one indicated at the start of this wee ramble), made something very clear to me. She was playing an extremely dangerous game.

Discovering the exact ins and outs of what happened is likely to never happen. This was an event of 30 years ago, and is likely buried deep in people’s memory. What I do know is what she told me, which was simple, and which I’ve come to regard as a moment of particularly lucid truthfulness in her retelling to me of the past.

Some local guys became convinced she was assisting the Police, and decided they would put a stop to it. They’d been making threats for a fair while, and must have decided to act.  They came to the house while my brother and I were at school (though where my youngest brother was, I do not know). They took her to a house in the country, and there, with her petrified at what they might do, they took out a kit, and began cooking up a dose. By now she’d figured out what they were doing. She had initially thought they were either going to scare her, rape her, or kill her, in ascending order of awfulness. But watching the guy with the spoon and the lighter, and wondering where the other guy was, she intervened. He must have been dithering with the spike, because she claims she looked him in the eye, pulled up her sleeve, dumping it on the kitchen table and just stated, “For Christs’ sake [Jimmy], just fucking do it. I can’t live like this anymore, and you can’t live like this anymore. Just fucking do it.”

He let her live.

F,FLP