My friend was not well, and I didn't realise, until we decided to drive 2400 kilometres to the Eyre Peninsula, just how not well. I knew that he was HIV positive, that he had Aids. He had thought that he was dying; in 2004. He told me that was the year when he thought his time was up. Now, once again, he had thought he was on the way out and had come to say goodbye. His first kidney had been whipped out with cancer and when he re-emerged; he was waiting for the test results on the second; with the fear that it, too, was cancerous. Instead, when the results came, it was only cysts.
So this was good news, a reprieve. That's the world you enter, when all the news is bad. His doctors had warned him that the hepatitis C would kill him before the HIV, so he was about to go on a treatment which would keep him sick for 48 weeks. All of this, from the days when our party was the best party in town; when he was a daring character in the great adventure of the emerging gay world. When everyone was utterly out of it and he would be sitting perched up in bed, about 18 or 19 then, with Philip Macarthy next to him; all of it such an hilarious outrage.
Tucked up there in those semi-derelict houses with spectacular views of Sydney. There in the late sixties and early seventies, we were just kids, I was barely 16, Philip just had this absolutely wild streak; drove like a lunatic, drank like a lunatic, fucked, from all the evidence, like a lunatic. He's dead now. Aids. John Bygate. Dead now. Brain hemorrhage Harry Godolphin. Dead now. Lung cancer. Most of the cast are dead now. Col was still going. Only the good die young, he said, and laughed as we drove through the night. I was in the company of someone exactly my own age.
I was warned, you are taking on responsibility for a complex medical problem. These guys are hard work. It's a long way from a hospital or a doctor. I didn't pay any attention, I just wanted out of town. Money that was meant to materialise from his relatives never did and on the day we left he said on the phone from Newcastle that it hadn't happened, he'd catch up with me when I got back. Let's just go, I'll cover you till the money comes, I said, and so he came down and we organised and were off, about ten in the evening. At times I thought, am I so lonely I'm paying for someone elses company. Or in this great experience, a kindness offered. Adam, Craig's brother from New Zealand, agreed to keep an eye on the house and use it as he saw fit. As it turned out he didn't do much but watch a bit of television.
We ended up staying the night at an old friend of mine's house in the Blue Mountains. Her only downside is she works at the Child Support Agency, an organisation I, like most separated blokes, particularly dislike. We avoid the topic. For she's a lovely person. We were hauled across the coals for beliefs that hadn't even happened yet. We met at Macquarie University in the seventies, and slept together once; all those years ago. Everyone slept with everyone in those days. Well, not exactly, but in those giant share houses everything was a discovery. The sounds that passed through the house in the early hours. The unexpected appearance of unexpected people in your bed late at night. There were always secrets, the mantra exploration, not just a right but a duty.
We stayed the night not realising how tired I was, after having planned to drive through the night. Downed three strong coffees and promptly went to sleep. We had no idea, really, just how far it was. I grew accustomed to your company. Never too old for a madcap roadtrip. We stopped for a cigarette on the edge of cliffs overlooking a giant valley. We drove and we drove and we drove. Streaky Bay was the location for a film Storm Boy from the 1970s so maybe it had somehow lodged from way back then, way back when.
We drove through the gusting heat until it felt like the car would melt. We stopped at Carcoar, which I've always liked, the third oldest settled township in NSW. I did a story once on the corner cafe when it was up for sale; an absolute bargain at something like $135,000. If I'd had the money I would have bought it myself. The story sparked a mini real estate boom I was told years later, with most of the main street changing hands.
We drove through to Hay; an area I was once told was regarded as bad luck by the aborigines. Thus it always seemed to be. As a hitch hiker I always got stuck there. Concrete motels in the baking heat. But in those days, who could afford a room?
We lodged in Mildura and stayed there for a couple of days; both of us down with some sort of stomach virus.
I read Lady Killers by Martina Cole; which Peter had given me. I disposed of it later. Having it bouncing around in the back of the car seemed to mark me out as some sort of wierdo. Almost none of the characters had any redeeming features nut she tells a good story.
It was all a chimera. It could all fall apart so easily. He needed to reign himself in. His head was just all over the shop.
In the middle of the night you talk about everything.
He remembers the exact day that he got the virus.
It was March 22, 1992, some date like that; and he was with his soul mate Howard and the condom burst. You'd have to be unlucky to catch one off just like that. Everyone around him freaked out but he, in the centre of the shock, was impervious. Howard was mortified. But three years later he was dead. Leaving Col distraught, surviving. He spent 20 years or so in Brisbane; with Howard, with others; but Howard was the one. Now they're all gone, lovers past, and he lives on, the party boy. Returning to Newcastle to be close to his family, as his health worsens. He was a very good party boy, great company, always extremely funny, maybe as he says himself not so much handsome as interesting. And now here, in this strangest, most misshapen of futures, barely missing an emu, kangaroos standing noble in the early light, a goat coming from nowhere, the rabbits coming back in large numbers but this generation smart enough to stay out of the headlights. Never too old for a road trip. I wonder if these will be the last wild animals I see, he muttered to himself one bracing, beautiful morning.
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