Title: One of THEM!

Author: Peter Wells

In: Sport 7: Winter 1991

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, July 1991, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 7: Winter 1991

A town without pity

page 91

A town without pity

'OK,' says Lemmy who's got over being bored, he's suddenly a fired up crackercaper, he's twenty-tied-together-tomthumbs all splattering and battering the silence out of the air, beating it up as the crackers crack, leap, ignite. Tang of gunpowder laces the air.

I look into Lemmy's face, his long straight nose, his gilded hair. His eyes glitter, outlined in mascara. Lemmy examines his nails, carefully, as if for dirt: but I know he's really thinking.

I stand there, wondering what's coming next. I hope he doesn't notice I've got a pimple coming up, right in the crease by my nose. Lemmy is very critical of things like that. But Lemmy is looking right through me, like he's read me cover-to-cover, I'm Sandra Dee, or Bobby Darin, positively South Pacific point, corny as Kansas. No I'm not Lemmy I silently say. test me.

This is how it always begins, right from the start: test me.

Lemmy jumps up and does his Pete Sinclair imitation. Happen Inn: 'New Zealand's Own Go-Go Show', The Chooks inside cages, rockhard beehives and go-go boots: Pete Sinclair jumps onto the blackwhite screen, like he's a genie just dying to get out from inside. He's wearing his old old crooked smile and baked-on hairdo. He turns sideways, sort of Spanish, clacks his heels, claps his hands together twice, hard, like castanets and yells out, 'Let's go! (clap! clap.) LETS GO!'

When Lemmy does it, it's like he lets you see the joke inside: and the joke is this: everything in New Zealand is so crumby it's laughable. Once you see the joke you can't stop laughing. This is the trick Lemmy taught me.

So we decide to fan the breeze, as Lemmy says. We escape into town, on the trolley, looking for excitement of which, that day, there is none. Instead it is cool, wet, lead-grey. The sky is all laced down to earth by black powerlines, as if everyone in this town is frightened to let the sky get too high, it might show us up for how small we really are.

We have a cup of coffee in the mezzanine lounge in 246, watching people go up and down on the escalators, but still nothing's happening so Lemmy takes me down to this toilet in a carpark, he takes me in very casually and we have a cigarette and read all the messages and words on the walls. While I am reading them, Lemmy gets out this pen, and, like he's done it before, writes right central and where it can't be missed, 'STICK YR STIFF DALK page 92 INTO MY HOT HOLE—(signed) a schoolboy.' Then he writes: 'I am all sexed up and ready.'

Underneath it Lemmy writes that very day, that very hour. I laugh, oh Lemmy I say, you're such a scream.

Lemmy goes deadpan: 'Let's go outside and watch the fun develop.'

We hide behind the concrete pillars and smoke away about five-ten minutes of no-time, when time stops and waits for something next to happen, to push it along again.

While we're waiting, Lemmy goes back to his old point: Why?

'Why what?' I say to Lemmy, my heart sinking because I know what he's talking about.

'Why bother?' Lemmy says then, throwing away his cigarette. I watch it roll over and over itself, disgorging ashes and splinters of fire and spark, till it dies. The wind then rocks it back-and-forth, gently, as if to show its emptiness.

He's talking School Cert.

'What's the use,' Lemmy says then, his unanswerable question.

What is the use? I don't know, I did once, I thought I did, then Lemmy showed me different.

'I haven't decided yet,' I say to Lemmy, stalling for time, trying to stop him, lying.

'I just gotta get outta this dump, Jamie,' Lemmy says, using my name which he hardly ever does-only when it's serious. 'If it's the last thing I ever do. . .' and his voice dies off into silence in which there is no sound at all, only a distant car horn suffocating. I think about what he means. Yet I know what he means: it's like we're on gas and it's being turned down so low you can hardly breathe any more, you're slowly dying on your feet but you keep on walking. It's like there's all the air in the world in this place but no oxygen.

Oh Lemmy, look at this, I say, then I do an imitation of the Supremes, singing BabyLove, with a mike and everything.

I got this yearnin'
   yearnin'
      yearnin' feelin'
         inside o' me'

page 93

I sing all falsetto. Lemmy looks at me, kind of smiles, a crooked curl of a smile, then Lemmy changes again, quickly. He forgets me. He puts his finger up to his lips.

'I think we got a live one.'

I lean out from behind the pillar very slowly.

A man in cling bermuda shorts gets out of a car slowly, looks both ways, carefully, then, with an almost elaborate casualness, he crosses the road and disappears into the toilet so quickly it's as if he's never been in the road at all.

I know Lemmy has got it wrong. Because this man is like any man you might see on the bus, he's not a pansyfairyqueerhomo, and just because of his ordinariness, I feel my whole flesh burn with the words on the wall plugholearsecock and I look at Lemmy feelspunkdalk and Lemmy looks through me, he has the same fever I can see.

But Lemmy waits for one second then beckons me from behind the pillar with his finger. It's very like a movie this: we silently move forward to the toilet door beyond which we can hear the slippery silvery sound of the water in the urinal cascading down and there's a kind of great silence, waiting.

I look at Lemmy as he listens. He is so tense his face has turned to metal: only his eyes flash over at me as he decides to enter, occupy this empty cell of silence.

He goes inside there for a moment, creeping in. I suddenly feel alone. I realise where I am. What if someone who lives up the road sees me?Then Lemmy tiptoes back, hides. Now his mouth opens wide, and Lemmy lets out his great screaming shriek from behind the wall.

I feel an intense rush of fear and excitement as Lemmy's scream echoes all over the concrete carpark, multiplies, comes together again, crashes and splinters apart. I don't know what to think, I am so excited by what Lemmy has just done.

The man torpedoes out of the toilet, quickly, not turning around, as if his face couldn't be seen, at all costs he must remain anonymous. I see now he is not so handsome, he is frightened. He gets into his car, a grey Morris Minor, registration number CL52043. He accelerates away while I scream out, taking over from Lemmy: 'WeirdoQueerPansyPoufterHomo! You Ought to Be Put Down! You Ought to be Dead!'

He kissed me on the lips till I came, I think.

Serves them right, I say to Lemmy after we've run away and finished page 94 screaming and shrieking, when we've slowed down and we realise there is nowhere else to go, that is our excitement for the day.

Serves him right, eh Lemmy, I say, but Lemmy doesn't say anything, doesn't say a word, just walks along all silent and unknown. Then suddenly he looks at me and I am scared. No Lemmy no. Don't. Please Lemmy, don't laugh at me.