The First Drink

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Sydney Park


"Most hide behind a smile because they are afraid of facing the world's complexity, its vagueness, its terrible beauties. If we stay safely ensconced behind our painted grin, then we won't have to encounter the insecurities attendant on dwelling in possibility, those anxious moments when one doesn't know this from that, when one could suddenly become almost anything at all. Even though the anxiety, usually over death, is in the end exhilarating, a call to be creative, it is in the beginning neither horrifying, a feeling of hovering in an unpredictable abyss. Most of us habitually flee from that state of mind, try to lose ourselves in distraction and good cheer. We don inauthenticity as a mask, a disguise to protect us from the abyss."
Eric G Wilson: Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy.

I was reading Lady Chatterly's Lover at school; it had only just become legal in Australia. I was a problem child. I had become so difficult to manage that my parents agreed to send me up to the Gold Coast for a holiday, even though it was during school term. It was shortly after my suicide attempt; and I kept crying all the time, gales of tears, acute distress, over what I had no idea. It was all just so appalling. Nothing settled. Everything was chaos. Everything jerked up into my heart; a gawky, adolescent boy. Every pimple was a source of historic embarrassment. Every expedition with the parents seemed to last forever; stuck in the back seat, gawking out, not yet a real person.

No wonder I embraced the bars with such gusto; was astonished to find a world where everybody wanted me; indeed, were prepared to pay.

Desperate to wipe out the past and establish a new beginning; that point of emergence, the beginning of a new story, the establishment of a new soul, was all inextricably linked to that trip to the Gold Coast. Now a glistening south coast of Spain style strip of magnificent beaches and souring skyscrapers, of schoolies week and big money, an area of enormous growth, with the traffic having doubled and doubled and doubled again; with clubs and money and the wealth of apartments; but back then, way back then, none of that was yet to occur. It was a place of holidays, but quaint, Australia in the 1950s kind of holidays, even though now we were in to the brave new 60s, and people my age could feel the world exploding far off, in all sorts of exciting and unpredictable and magnificent ways.

I wrote, even back then, stories about all sorts of t hings; and it seemed to me if I was going to be a writer I had to get out and experience life; a fundamental pre-requisite. I'm not sure even now how I managed to talk my parents into sending me up there; to paying for my board at the Vista del Mar, or whatever it was called, a a sea-side hotel which provided full board. It was just opposite the beach, all you had to do was walk across on to the white sand; and I would walk up and down Coollangatta Beach, entranced by the mystery of it all.

There was a group staying there, they might have have been 19 or 20 years old, anyway older than me, down from Brisbane on holidays, and I became fascinated by them. Not least because the lead boy, surrounded by girls, was astonishingly handsome, in that ginger blond chiseled but charming way some of the sun blessed have; and I did my best to fall in with them around the guesthouse. One day Normie Rowe was playing up the road; and I organised to go with them, on some splendid coach that carried us through the great, mysterious night to the fun palaces further up the coast. I was a young looking 15 and didn't have a chance of getting near the bar, but somehow I got in to watch Normie. It was my first night club, an enormous barn, and I had no idea what to do or how to play it.

I got lost in the crowd, but before I did the girls in the group organised me a drink, just as they had the evening before.

That had been one of those limpid evenings on the coast; the quiet slurping of the water, the still air, the luminous sunset, the cool stolid depth of the sand jumping out to meet me. I wasn't allowed in the drinking area, but the girls said they'd get me a drink, what did I want? I had no idea, and I told them so, a heart clenching moment when all was well, on the border of great things. They came back out to where I sat on the promenade wall watching the sunset, and gave it to me, a cherry brandy and lemonade. It was their favourite drink. I was grateful, happy towards them, and they disappeared back inside to be with Simon, that most handsome of boys.

I drank the cherry brandy quickly, not mad about the taste; and the world lit up, just like that. This is what it's all about, I've finally arrived, I thought. As they say in therapy: it coloured me in, it made me the person I wanted to be, it cohered me into a single whole. I had broken the sound barrier: I had drunk alcohol. Soon I would break other barriers; and become a teenage alcoholic, scamming bottles and drinking them till I passed out; anywhere. But this was then and all the trouble was later; and then the luxurious chemical lit me up like a Christmas tree; all problems past, the world a truly beautiful, wonderful place.

They went back to Brisbane, Simon and his girls, and the Vista del Mar was quiet then, out of season quiet. I finished reading Lady Chatterly's Lover, then an enormously daring thing to do; and before too long returned to my dismal life as a high school student; sitting in classes I hated in a school I hated, cringing amongst my tormentors and waiting to be bashed. But just for a moment there, when I had my first drink, when the sun set across that Coollangatta Beach of the 1960s, when all was mysterious and wonderful and brave and fabulous, when I was a real person and the whole world lay before me, when there was fun to be had and the alcohol coursed through my veins, providing delicious relief from the multiple selves, the multiple pain, that moment when I discovered a great friend and a great life project, that moment lived with me. I passed around Lady Chatterly's lover, the best bits marked, big noting myself, talking about the trip back alone on the bus, about everything that had happened, intimating that there could have been even more than what actually happened. But it wasn't long after that before I was belted worse than ever, and walked down that long windy road crying, never to return.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.voanews.com/english/2008-03-01-voa13.cfm

With his deployment in Afghanistan no longer secret, Prince Harry, 23, has flown back to Britain. The third in line to the throne was greeted at Brize Norton air base by his father Prince Charles and older brother Prince William. In London, Tom Rivers reports for the VOA.

When details of Prince Harry's tour of duty were disclosed in the media, it became clear that his time at a forward base in volatile Helmand Province was drawing to a close. In fact, the prince called himself a "bullet magnet."

On Saturday, his father Prince Charles and his older brother Prince William met Harry at Brize Norton air base near Oxford. Charles said he now knows what being a parent of a son or daughter on active duty can do to your nerves.

"While being incredibly proud of Harry, I am, I promise, you equally proud for what it is worth of all of the dedicated service given by all our armed forces," he said.

Reacting to Prince Harry's return, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the right decision was made to get him out of Afghanistan. He said security considerations for the prince were paramount.

"I think the whole country is going to be delighted that Prince Harry has come back safely, that his security has been protected," he said. "Very grateful for him for the work that he has done in Afghanistan. Very grateful to all the soldiers as he is for all the support they gave him and also for what they are doing for their country."

For ten weeks, the third in line to the throne worked as a forward air controller, a job that included calling in air strikes on Taliban targets. But when foreign media blew Harry's cover, and the British media followed, defense officials in London activated contingency plans to get Harry out of harm's way and back to Britain.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/iemma-bans-campaign-trail-perks/2008/03/01/1204227061603.html

DONATIONS of offices, cars and phones to political candidates will be banned after it was revealed an MP named at the ICAC corruption inquiry ran her campaign from an office provided rent-free by a disgraced developer.

It's feared the in-kind donations system, in which benefactors give substantial support, is too easy to rort even though the rules say non-cash donations must be declared.

Premier Morris Iemma also plans to ban the payment of bills by outsiders, declaring all invoices must be paid by party head offices.

The present system makes it almost impossible to detect rorting because it relies on the honesty of political candidates. If they don't declare a backer paid their office electricity bill, or campaign office rent, or lent them a mobile phone for a campaign, no one would know.

Other candidates have had bills for printing and posters picked up by third parties, saving them tens of thousands of dollars.

Mr Iemma said the community rightly expected total transparency when "it comes to who donates to political candidates".

"Stage two of my reforms to political donations will prevent donors attempting to fly under the radar by providing in-kind support to candidates," he said.

"Electoral changes can't be sketched out on the back of an envelope - they take time and careful consideration - but I'm determined to make them work."