One consequence of living in a house without children is that Rocky has been condemned to sleep alone. Pluto and Lolly, the two Jack Russells who lived with us through the years when every minute of my day was accounted for in the diary page that my assistant put on my desk each night before she left to go home, suffered no such fate. They slept on the beds of my children, Pluto usually on my son’s bed, Lolly, on my daughter’s, though I do recall that there were nights when both dogs made the decision to sleep together on either my son’s or daughter’s bed. Just why this urge to sleep together took hold of them every now and then is inexplicable.
There are a few people who I miss from that time when I was more or less living on the third floor of perhaps the ugliest building in Melbourne, my office windows looking out across the railway tracks to the bayside western suburbs, a vista I loved, especially at night. I see them every now and then and we talk about old times and also about the parlous state of newspapers. I find myself unable to advise them about how the future could be made less fraught. That they still wish to see me every now and then I take to mean that at times, they thought perhaps I knew what I was doing and that at times they even considered me to be amusing. When they laughed at my attempts at humor, it was not always because I held their fate, as far as work goes, in my hands.
Several weeks ago, despite my wife’s warning that it would end in tears, I decided to take Rocky’s bed– an oval shaped pink pillow-like thing that is covered with a soft yet durable and washable synthetic material, into the bedroom at night. I placed the bed as close to the door as possible and as far away from the human bed as could be managed. He was to be a quiet sleeper if he were to remain there. No growling would be allowed and were it to be disovered that he was a loud dreamer, that too would inevitabley mean banishment back to the lounge room. His bed, in the morning, was to be taken back into the lounge room so as not to give him the impression that the bedroom was as much his as anyone else’s.
Rocky seemed to accept all this with alacrity. Each night, an hour or so before the time for bed came, he waited quietly, as restrained as he could manage, by his bed, ready to retire for the night. He followed me as I carried his bed to the bedroom and once it was in its proper place, he immediately climbed in, rolled himself up into something close to a ball, and pretended to drift off to sleep. Not a sound did he make through the night. If he dreamt, they were dreams that did not elicit yelps and soft growls. Before dawn, when I was already awake, Rocky came to the edge of the bed and sat staring at me in the darkness. He yawned. He gave himself a shake. He stretched. He breathed heavily. When I finally got out of bed, Rocky made his way into the lounge room to wait, lying still on his back, for the day to get going.
This lasted for two weeks. The changes were small at first, but perceptible. It struck me that Rocky was a gradualist rather than a revolutionary. I thought of all those so-called change agents, some of whom I had experienced personally in newspapers, appointed to change the culture of an organisation quickly, often with ruinous consequences. They could learn something from him. Rocky started to drag his bed closer to the human bed. A little closer each night. Then his dreams became more audible and the growls began, middle of the night growls at the wind or the whistling masts on the boats at the Elwood Marina. Instead of just sitting beside the bed staring at me in the darkness of early morning, he started to jump up, rest his paws on the bed and sniff loudly. It was clear where this was heading.
One night I lay listening to him. Thoughts come from nowhere in the middle of the night. I remembered the silky terrier puppy that was stolen from me in Fitzroy when I was a child and I could not remember where the puppy had slept. It was certainly not in the bedroom I shared with my parents. I thought of the red setters, Gemmy and Treacle, the dogs of my Canberra years when the Whitlam Government inspired and disappointed me in equal measure. I think they slept together in the laundry, Gemma and Treacle, at the back of the house, though it is possible, given the life I led back then, as irregular and unpredictable as my life now is ordered and measured, that they slept anywhere they felt like sleeping, just as I often did.
Dogs adapt to anything. They may be creatures of habit but they are not set in their ways. They adapt and change and they become markers to the passing of time, of a life I suppose. They have been markers of my life, I think, even when I lived without them. A couple of months after I took home the golden retriever I had found wandering down the street where we lived in East St Kilda, my life changed. There were three of us living in that house, three young men in search of truth, prepared to go down any road in order to find it–at least that’s what we thought– when I saw Easy Rider at the movies. It is possible that the impact on me of the movie–which I have seen subsequently several times and found it, with each viewing, more and more trite, though Jack Nicholson’s performance and presence is fabulous– was due primarily to my conviction back then that certain drugs, as Aldous Huxley had revealed to me in The Doors of Perception, were aids to the opening of doors in the mind which otherwise would remain shut.
The plot was fairly straightforward. The music was –and remains–magnificent. It was the story of two young men who bought motorcycles and rode them from Los Angeles into the Deep South. Along the way, they took LSD, had hallucinations, swam in a river while they were tripping, rode on, were arrested by redneck police and charged with drug possession and when they were freed on bail through the work of Jack Nicholson, the local small town lawyer, they were shot dead while riding their bikes, by two guys driving a pick up truck.
Harry the golden retriever, having stayed with us for several months, decided to go in search of something better. Had he not done so, I wonder, would I have left him behind? Would I have left the Age then, not much more than a year after I had been taken on as a cadet– that moment when I was told I had a job at the Age one of the greatest moments of my life– bought a motor bike and together with one of young men I lived with, headed for Queensland, which back then in my mind, was the Australian version of the American Deep South? Harry was a much loved dog, the recipient of the sort of love that three young men in search of truth were capable of giving him. He seemed more than satisfied.
Clearly he was not that satisfied and perhaps just like me, Harry had concluded that his truth was not to be found with three young men who seemed to sit around a lot listening to the Moody Blues and especially Leonard Cohen’s Songs From a Room or reading poetry to each other, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, often in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, even as Harry made his decision to go, I took the message of Easy Rider to be that the truth could not be found at The Age but was more likely to be discovered in Queensland. Two young men on purple-painted motor bikes, one of them wearing a leather jacket with a large, rather realistic looking tiger painted on the back, both of them long-haired and in the fashion of the times, wearing silver rings on every finger would surely never have a dull moment in Joh Bjelke Petersen’s heyday. We hoped however, that these experiences, would not include, an Easy Rider ending, with both of us being shot and killed by a couple of Queensland rednecks.
I painted my Honda purple in the courtyard of the block of flats where Stella Saper, my friend and mentor lived. Stella was a painter and weaver whose home was a meeting place for young painters and writers and musicians. She was older than us, 15 years or more older and looking back, I suppose she mothered me, but if she did, I was not aware of it at the time. She encouraged me to write. She made me feel special. She laughed at my jokes and my silliness. She fed me and praised me. What I now wonder, did I do for her? She painted my portrait before I left for Queensland. She made me look like a writer, staring out into the world, serious, troubled, full of potential but fragile in a masculine way.
I did not see that portrait again for almost 10 years. Shortly after I rode off for Queensland, a tiger on my back if not in my tank, Stella moved to Israel and bought a flat in the Old City in Jerusalem. We lost touch. Then in 1981, when I was based in London for the old Sun News Pictorial, we went to Israel for three weeks, my wife and I and our two small children. Stella and I had not spoken or written to each other for a decade but when she opened the front door of her flat to us, what I saw over her shoulder, what I saw first in that flat, the walls of which were covered with paintings and tapestries, mostly scenes of Jerusalem, of the Old City’s Jewish Quarter, the streets and markets and the Wailing Wall, a Jerusalem of Jews and Jewish landmarks, was my portrait, hanging there on the wall opposite the door. It was more or less as I remembered it, though I was not quite as handsome and brooding in the painting as I had thought. I asked Stella whether I could have the painting. She smiled, a small smile, a half smile really, knowing and gentle, the smile full of memories, and then said that she wanted to keep the painting. It was the only painting or tapestry she had there, hanging on her walls, of her life in Australia. We spoke little of her life in Israel or my life in London. Her only child, her son, was serving in the army. This was just before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon but I don’t know whether her son fought in that war. I do remember Stella saying that every one of her hopes and dreams about Israel, the hopes and dreams she never spoke about to me in Australia, had been fulfilled.
In 2006, when I was based in Washington for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, I went to Israel to cover the Israeli elections and I went to see Stella. We had not spoken or written to each other for 25 years. I knew that Stella had been ill, that she had had a stroke. When she opened the door of her flat, I did not recognise her. She had gone grey. She was large, old babushka large, and her skin was yellow and loose on her face. She must have seen my shocked confusion, for she quickly reached out for my hand and pulled me to her. Over her shoulder, my portrait was still there, on the wall, the old wooden frame now close to being antique.
We ate together in a seafood restaurant on a street from which you could see the Dome of the Rock, the golden dome sparkling in the Jerusalem light. I don’t remember much of our conversation except that it was full of affection. Stella said that looking at me made her feel old, I remember that and I was not sure what she meant, that I looked old or that I looked young, but whatever it meant, there was something about the way she said it and the way she smiled that Stella smile, diffident and generous at the same time, that made me feel heartsick. We spent a few days together. She told me about her son and her grandchildren. She asked me whether I was writing a novel, poetry. We walked together through the Jewish section of the Old City and I felt grateful for this time with her even though there was this gulf between us: this place that she had made her home was not my home.
Stella died a year later. Her son emailed me and sent me photographs of her funeral. He also sent me photographs of Stella with her four grandchildren, taken months before she died. Her smile was broad and full and overflowing with not so much love, as joy. Sandy said that he had taken my portrait off the wall and taken it with him to his home in northern Israel and that he would give it to me but only if I came to get it. Sandy was a little boy when Stella was my mentor. I wonder what he thought of all those young writers and poets and painters who came to Stella for whatever it was that they needed.
I wonder what he thought as he watched me paint that Honda purple in his courtyard and later, when I left wearing that tiger on my back, the Honda’s note just about perfect, what he said to Stella who never once questioned me about this decision I had made to quit The Age and head for Queensland. I might ask him one day. I might tell him how we did manage to have similar experiences to those of the two young men in Easy Rider. We took Aldous Huxley’s advice and concluded that he knew what he was talking about. We searched for the truth in this way and in other ways and at times I thought we had glimpses of it. We lived in a commune with an Italian philosopher who had come from Florence where he was a professor of philosophy, to Queensland, accompanied by two young women, perhaps 15 years his junior, to find some land in a rainforest somewhere so that he could sever all ties with a rotten to the core western civilisation. He was a logical positivist who believed the only truth that existed was truth that could be physically verified. He drove me mad with frustration because I suspected that this was bullshit, but found it impossible to mount a coherent argument against it. We had agreed not to read books for pleasure and so at night, using a flashlight, in the bed on the verandah of the old house on stilts, I read Nexus Plexus and Sexus, which I had bought at a secondhand bookshop in Brisbane shortly after we first arrived. I thought Henry Miller had lived my idea of a life. I realised that I was not a logical positivist.
In the end, our search for truth ended, at least in Queensland. In the end, my friend bought himself a puppy and called it Truth and that was that. Truth, I am pretty sure, alway slept on my friend’s bed. I could follow his long ago example and give in to what I fear is Rocky’s determination to end up sleeping on the human bed rather than in his own perfectly comfortable and soft oval -shaped pillow on which he has slept since he arrived as a puppy more than a year and a half ago. I am sure that vets who deal with these things would advise me to be firm and insist that Rocky stay in his bed, by the door, and that he remain silent through the night. How exactly I would insist on all this, firmly or otherwise, is unclear. It may be that he will have to be sent back to the loungeroom but I find that thought, of him being banished, almost appalling. I will try the stern and firm middle of the night laying down of the law, but my track record on these things as far as Rocky is concerned, is not all that good.
