Last Bender

This is a quixotic post, more personal than I usually do, and really, it’s just a signal sent out into the void, hoping for contact with anyone who lived at 3 Berry Place in Darwin, Australia in 1983. I lived in a tent in the back yard for 3 months, I forget which three but it was the dry season, and slightly into the build-up. I met Mark Dearden there by coincidence. He had been an exchange student at Mamaroneck Highschool in 1977. When I told people 6 years later that I was going to Australia, they joked about my saying hello to him. I had a hilarious conversation about rimming with a woman who lived in the house and hated Americans, Lynn. She had friends who brought hash in from Bali in condoms they had swallowed. She shared with me the rhyming slang her parents used and said that during the Depression they smoked cow shit rolled in newspaper. Then there were Roger and Elizabeth. Roger was French, Elizabeth was from Canberra originally. She dressed up in a giant bird costume to entertain children. Roger played backgammon naked, and a French card game related to bridge, Tarot. Kingsley was from Yorkshire, England and made tuna casserole on his night to cook. Boofah, or Steve, was a marvelous man from Melbourne with a big head. Jason was from Kenya originally. I ran into his brother 6 months later in Singapore, another coincidence. Tony and Mary were the house mother and father I suppose. They were building a sailboat with Little Tony, a man who could build a boat with only his eye for a measure. Tony (not little Tony) used to sneak off to buy pies and pasties without Mary’s knowledge (she didn’t approve of meat). Who else? Well, I can’t say exactly. Shelly and I paid a pittance to sleep in a tent and then, eventually, we moved into the house. The water was heated with a solar heater, and was stored in cisterns. We went to a Fassbinder film, Fox and his Friends. A couple of blocks away was a strip mall with amazing Sicilian style pizza, and a small farmer’s market. Jason kept a bantam chicken in the backyard which laid tasy little eggs. We had paw paws, guava, banana, lemon grass and other fruit growing around the house, as well as the best weed I have ever smoked. There were louvered windows without screens. The giant cockroaches and grasshoppers would fly into the living room and strike you on the forehead, to everyone’s amusement. I loved living in this house. One other person renting a room was Paul, an American. He was older than the rest of us, in his mid forties. Very tall and thin, with a beard and long hair. Paul was a Quaker and owned a share in some cooperative land outside of town, where he kept a trailer. We stayed with him there and swam in a billibong where water buffalo came to wallow and watched flocks of sulfur crested white cockatoos and black cockatoos with scarlet crests roost in the naked trees. We had dinner with friends of his who kept wild black pigs they had captured. Paul had been in The American Friends Service during the American Phase of the Vietnam Wars. He went a virgin and, while on leave in San Francisco in 1968, lost his virginity and tried acid. He returned, met and married a Vietnamese woman whose father worked for Shell Oil. They left Vietnam under threat of execution and he gave up his US citizenship to live with her in Australia. When I met him he was divorced. We used to swim with him in the late afternoons. We’d drive to the Casuarina Beach. The coast there has mile upon mile of deserted, white beaches. The water is gentle and quite shallow. We would wade a quarter mile out and only be up to our hips at low tide. The water was warm and pure. Paul always drank a little, saying it had all of the minerals you needed. He was a gentle, intelligent, powerful man, good humored and so kind. Life in Darwin was good. I have no idea why I left. I would love just to say hello to anyone who was there at that time and remembers me and Shelly.