Animator! Carpe Diem! (Part 3)

Animator! 

Carpe Diem! 

(Part 3)

Sachi showed me into a small office and gestured vaguely towards the work piled upon an animation desk. 

“Take a look at the scene,” she said. “See if you can figure out what it needs. Nobody’s touched it since the animator left this morning. We’ve got to finish it by 10am tomorrow and get it to camera. Okay?”

“Okay,” I answered, sitting down at the desk.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” said Sachi. “Want a coffee?”

“Yes, please.” 

Show business, there really is no business like it. 

That morning I’d been at the right place at the right time and showed up with my demo reel, looking for a job. Now here I sat, at another man’s desk to finish his scene. 

A scene urgently needed in a timely manner.

Aha! It’s always better to be lucky than good! 

I rolled through the scene. It was an action scene of a big, burly guy throwing a body into the trunk of a car. I rolled through it repeatedly, trying to visualize it, get familiar with it, seeking its essence. It was quality work. The drawings were solid… the animation smooth and fluid. 

I breathed a sigh of relief. It was a good scene to show what I could do. The animator had used a system I could understand and the drawings were interesting without being too difficult. 

By the time Sachi returned with the coffee I was feeling confident I could finish the scene before the deadline, provided I could work all night.

“Well, what do you think?” asked Sachi.

I sipped my coffee. “Yeah,” I said. “I think I can handle it. It’s a fun scene, and it’s mostly done. All I have to do is not mess it up.”

“Good,” said Sachi. “Anything you need?”

I mentioned working all night and asked if that would be okay. Sachi nodded, saying, “Sure, a few of us will be.”

“Mind if I use the telephone?” I asked. “I’d like to call my wife and let her know what’s up.”

“Help yourself.”

“Thanks.”

Sachi left me to it, and after telephoning I began working on the scene. It was interesting in that the drawings were done straight onto frosted cels with colored pencils. Not graphite on paper, as I was used to. One had to be precise and clean with the drawing, rather than my usual scratch and search technique. I had never seen a frosted cel before and I quickly learned I had to be careful, as any erasing would leave smudges, destroying the drawing and meaning time lost in making another. Also, when handling the cels, soft cotton gloves had to be worn to avoid fingerprints, but I had used gloves before and was used to that.

I got down to work. After a while, I fell into a rhythm and began enjoying myself. I love animating. More than that I love making movies. And if you love doing something, it’s hardly work, is it? When I first started my working life, back at the Ministry of Works in New Zealand, we worked in muddy ditches at the ends of picks and shovels with our muscles and our backs and the sweat of our brows. Physical work! Dangerous and manly, with plenty of cursing! I wondered what the ghosts from my past would think of me now, sitting here in New York drawing little drawings in a Broadway film studio built to resemble a child’s playroom. For sure I knew, wherever they were, my ghostly workmates wouldn’t think that sitting on your ass drawing little pictures with colored pencils was anything remotely like working. 

Rest in peace, brothers. Your work is through.

I stopped for a late lunch, ducking out for a slice of pizza, a bottle of Rolling Rock and a cigarette. The beer was a most appreciated luxury, but I was working now and could afford it. A further luxury was a second cigarette, sitting on a bench in the sunshine, resting my sore leg and watching people go by. 

Funny how much friendlier New Yorkers looked after I’d had a meal, with a full belly and a job to go back to. 

Back at the desk working, I had an idea. The action by the burly guy when preparing to throw the heavy body into the trunk of the car (in animation, this preparing type of action is called anticipation) could be exaggerated more, or ‘pushed’ as we call it, to good effect. The body that was supposed to be heavy would have a much better chance of looking heavy this way, and the viewer would have slightly more time to appreciate what was happening. It would mean making the scene longer to accommodate the extra time that the action would take (a few tenths of a second), something that wasn’t always possible in a tightly edited film, so I would have to check with Sachi about it.

“Okay,” she agreed. “Let’s try it and see what it looks like. But, for now, don’t throw out any drawings and don’t change the original X-sheet. We can shoot it both ways and see which we like best. We’ll change the sheet later if it works out.”

I got down to work again and the hours flew by. I couldn’t see the day ending and the night beginning from the windowless office, but the tempo and noise of the busy studio during the day was gradually replaced by an eerie quiet. 

Around five in the morning, that dreadful hour after working all night when everything is gray and uncertain, including the animator, I struck a drawing I couldn’t get right. It should have been a simple drawing, too, making it all the more frustrating. I tried over and over, wasting cel upon cel, but still it wouldn’t come. I was tired. I decided to take a break. It would do me good to get up and stretch my legs for a bit, to focus my eyes on something further away than the end of my arm, maybe have a cigarette and another cup of ... 

“Coffee! Hey, Rusty, wake up! Fresh coffee.”

I had fallen asleep at the desk. 

“Huh? Who?” I lifted my head from my crossed arms on the desk, blinking in the strong light of the Luxo lamp, which I had neglected to turn off. “I wasn’t asleep,” I lied, and I heard Sachi laugh. My mouth tasted of pencil shavings and pink erasers. The side of my face was hot where it had been exposed to the drawing lamp.

“Coffee?” repeated Sachi.

“Oh, yeah. Thanks.” I accepted the hot coffee with gratitude. “It’s been a while since I’ve pulled an all-nighter,” I said. “Working, that is.”

Sachi smiled and asked how it was going. She looked fresh and awake.

“What time is it now?” I asked.

“Seven-thirty.”

“Two more hours, no more,” I promised.

“Perfect!” she said. 

To be continued…

Animator! Carpe Diem! (Part 2)

Animator!

Carpe Diem! 

(Part 2)

Sachi stopped halfway down the corridor.

“Well,” she said, turning to me. “Today’s your lucky day!”

“Oh yeah?” I answered hopefully. “I like the sound of that!”

I had just been interviewed and had shown my demo reel, hoping to land my first animation gig in New York with the company Sachi worked for, Broadcast Arts.

Now we stood chatting in the corridor.

Sachi said they had a problem, and maybe I could help. Nothing to do with White Cloud bathroom tissue, the job they had called me about which started next month. This was something else, an emergency, but if I did well, then the White Cloud job was as good as mine.

“An audition, eh?” I answered. “Sure, if I can help.” 

What else was I going to say? 

“Call it a chance to prove what you can do,” answered Sachi. She explained that the animator who had been working on the scene, after working more than two days and nights straight, told the boss (Wolf) to shove his deadline, and had gone home to get some sleep.

“I totally sympathize with the guy,” said Sachi. “The hours on this one were murder and getting worse! But, you know art directors, we had to change something at the last minute and now the schedule’s all screwed up! Wolf! He took this job knowing the deadline was crazy. Hope he’s charging them plenty.”

The problem was, said Sachi, they needed the scene now. Right now.

I nodded my head. Sounded like animation in America wasn’t any different from animation in New Zealand… a job fit for lunatics, optimists, geeks and dreamers.

I’ll let you decide which of those I might be.

“I want to ask you something,” I said to Sachi. “I wouldn’t want to steal someone’s job or anything like that. He went home to take a break, right? And here I am, in the right place at the right time. A miracle! You know, like those old movie musicals, where the star twists an ankle and the understudy, in this case me, gets his big chance!” 

“Yeah,” laughed Sachi. “That’s pretty much it.”

My life wasn’t about making movies, I told Sachi, my life was becoming a movie!

“Let’s hope it’s not a tragedy, where we all die in the last act,” said Sachi, and we laughed together.

We had stopped in the middle of the corridor and people streamed past in either direction. The buzzy energy of the studio was very positive, and I felt myself becoming energized too, and swept up by the rightness of the moment.

Now was my chance, I must seize it!  

“Don’t worry about John,” said Sachi. “You’re not taking his job, you’re helping him out.” She looked me straight in the eye for a moment, before adding, “If you can do the work like you say you can.”

“No worries there,” I bragged, trying not to look worried. 

What else was I going to say?

“Hey! Sachi!” Up rushed a young man wearing lab coat and white gloves. He nodded to me before turning to Sachi, saying, “Wolf says where’s the polarizing filters for the big Mitchell? He was sure we had some and I can’t find them anywhere!” 

He didn’t look very well, kind of clammy and quivering. But you see that a lot in the animation business. His gloved hands (he wore soft white gloves for handling cels) were trembling slightly and he had that odd, greenish cast one gets from lack of sleep and too much caffeine. He must have been a camera operator, I figured, because he was looking for polarizing filters for a Mitchell, which is a type of animation camera, and he had an X-sheet (exposure sheet, the guide to how a scene will be photographed) on a clipboard under his arm. With a deadline approaching he’d probably been working long hours, too, like everyone else. Maybe longer. Hours of tedium alone in the dark, adjusting the camera incrementally and photographing cel after cel, frame after frame, painstakingly building up a movie one-twenty-fourth-of-a-second at a time.

Camera operator. I’d done that too, when making my own films. You had to be crazy to do it. Crazy, and geeky because it requires an incredible amount of focus and accuracy.

“We need the polarizers for 18B!” he explained excitedly, adding, “It’s the scene with all the elves!” as if that made all the difference.

“Okay,” said Sachi. “Take it easy.”

He appeared to be a geek on the edge of exhaustion, green and trembling. Just wait till the rest of you starts twitching, I thought. Better ease up, brother, or curl up somewhere and get some sleep. 

I recalled how my dad, exhausted after a ridiculous number of hours on the job, would curl up under his Disney animation desk and take himself a well earned snooze. (He had proudly hauled that desk from the Disney studio in Burbank, where he’d spent seven years animating, all the way to New Zealand when we immigrated there in the 1960s. Later, in one of life’s strange twists, at my dying mother’s request I became my father’s apprentice, and learned animation from him.) When, from exhaustion, his eyes could no longer see and his hands could no longer draw, dad would curl up in the spacious footwell of the giant desk, the chair rolled back out of the way, and have a nap.

“Call me at three o’clock, please, son,” he’d say before closing the door to his office. “I’m going to get a little shuteye.” Inside, he would lift the phone off the hook (purely habit, for who was going to call at three A.M.?) switch off the Luxo lamp above his drawing disc and lastly, turn off the music he always had playing as he worked. 

He would pause for a few seconds with his hand at the recording machine, listening with pleasure, before turning the volume down and off with a soft click.

My father loved music. Country and western music, mostly.

You’d think that I, after listening to my father’s music all those years while I learned animation at his side, would love country and western music too, wouldn’t you?

Well, you’d be wrong.

It was a bittersweet day for me when for the first time I stayed awake and carried on while my father had to succumb to exhaustion and take to his desk for some sleep. Yes, I was proud of myself for having the strength to carry on where I saw my father stumble, but I was also sad because I had crossed an invisible line I knew I could never recross. For the first time in my life, my father seemed smaller than me. 

I hadn’t seen the line or even noticed the crossing of it, but I knew I would never think of my father in the same way again. 

“Okay,” said Sachi to the young cameraman. “Tell Wolf I’ll be right there.” 

He hurried off. Sachi leaned against the wall and breathed a deep sigh. She was tired, too.

“There’s no business like show business,” I said, trying to indicate I understood.

“How would I know?” laughed Sachi. “I used to be a school teacher. Now I work in an insane asylum!”

   To be continued…

Me and Moby Dick (Part 4)

I got to my feet and began lurching along as fast as I could, away from the elevator and toward the bright sunlight of Irving Place, a dozen or so paces away.

“Come on, Flasher!” I said to myself. “You can make it!” 

But my foot must have been more hurt than I realized, because just as I was about to reach the exit and safety, I stumbled again and fell with a thud to the floor of the lobby. 

Turning to look behind me, I gasped in terror as the dogs bounded down the last steps of the staircase and hit the shiny lobby floor.

Moby Dick was leading the way.

He stopped, and the pack behind him stopped. He looked around slowly, searching with his little black eyes. I lay still, and held my breath. He seemed to look right at me, but did nothing. His pure white body glowed in the relative darkness of the lobby. Then, looking around, he caught sight of my discarded jacket, and scampered down the hallway, stopping with his little nose inches from the jacket, sniffing and smelling. 

As I and the silent pack watched, Moby Dick walked all around the jacket, sniffing at its circumference. 

He was thinking. Remembering. Scheming.

Then he raised his head and began to howl! It was a wild sound that seemed impossible from so small a thing. Spittle flew from his upturned muzzle and his white coat shook with exertion. His button eyes bulged beneath his bangs as he howled and howled.

Now the pack rushed at the jacket and pounced, tearing and ripping in horrible violence as Moby Dick continued to howl his evil song of vengeance and death.

Suddenly from behind I felt strong hands under my arms and I was lifted to my feet! I turned to face Javier, who had returned to help when he discovered I was not behind him, running for our lives on Irving Place. 

“Rapido!” he cried. His panicky eyes darted from me to the dogs. “Rapido!” he hissed again, tugging at me.

“Madre de Madres!” I answered. “I’m with you, mate!”

Javier started running. All I could do was hop, my foot being hurt, and I had difficulty keeping up. I called out but Javier didn’t hear me. He kept running towards Fourteenth Street. At the intersection, he turned the corner and was gone!

He turned in the opposite direction, I noticed, from Empire Messenger Service.

A few paces along Irving Place, I stopped and collapsed onto a public bench. My foot ached and I was exhausted. My shaking hands vainly searched for a cigarette, until I remembered smokes and lighter were in my discarded jacket. My fallen comrade jacket, torn to shreds in the lobby of a midtown apartment building by a snarling pack of vicious lapdogs.

Lapdogs led by a devil. 

With a sigh I dropped my head into my hands and stared down at the pavement. I was tired, and a little dizzy. I must have looked a sight, too. My jacket was gone, my pants were torn and dirty, my foot was a soggy, reddish mess.

Then a little dog trotted into my field of vision. It stopped and sat down, looking up at me.

“Bloody hell!” I screamed, forgetting where I was and thinking I was back in the lobby. “Get it away from me! Argh!”

“Control yourself, young man!” barked a feminine voice. 

“Huh? What?” I said, looking up. There stood a large, matronly woman, staring down at me. She glared at me in a haughty fashion, obviously disgusted by the sight of another bum or drug addict on her neighborhood bench. She wore an expensive fur coat. In her bejeweled hand was a leash, on the other end of which was her tiny pet, a black and gold Silky Terrier, also bejeweled. It was he who had trotted into my field of vision and sat down to stare at me. I’d mistaken him for a member of Moby Dick’s gang.

“Drug addict scum,” snarled the woman. Her eyes glinted with animosity and behind that, deeper but perceptible, glowed a kind of sadistic delight. One could see she believed that whatever misfortune was heaped upon you in life, it was your own damn fault and you were getting what you deserved!

A pitiless creature. Even to herself, probably.

“Come, Petronius,” she commanded in her haughty tone. She gave a little tug on the leash. 

Ah, but Petronius, who had his pride too, was loath to leave, and stubbornly sat where he was. 

“Petronius!” she repeated louder. “Come!” 

With a second good tug that brought a cry of surprise from pop-eyed Petronius, she turned and they were on their way, looking more like a grizzly bear leading a rat on a string than a well-heeled dowager with her tiny dog in tow.   

I laughed in disgust. I was angry. Angry at the dowager who’d mistaken me for a drug addict. Angry at Mrs Harp and Moby Dick and the dogs of apartment 2C who’d tried to kill me. Angry at Javier for slamming the door on my foot. Angry at the boss who’d sent me to Irving Place. Angry at New York City where I couldn’t get a break in animation. 

Angry at myself for trying to catch my dreams. 

Then I started laughing. 

Aw, what’s the use, I thought, in being angry? It wasn’t anyone’s fault that things sometimes go wrong. So what if a few crazy dogs had tried to eat me? I’d lived through it, hadn’t I? This was New York City, after all, and you had to expect a few ups and downs now and then. 

That’s life!

Have a beer and get over it.

After resting a few minutes, I hobbled to the station and caught the subway home.

Me and Moby Dick (Part 2)

    I hurried down the hall and knocked on the door of 2C.

It smelled of dog poop at this end of the hallway.       

   I knocked again. Mrs Harp emerged, not from the door upon which I knocked, but from the apartment behind me, across the hall, and shrieked; 

   “About time you got here!” 

   I recognized the angry voice I’d heard buzzing over the phone in the boss’s office not five minutes before. It was a very hard, high, irritating sound, especially grating to my foreigner’s ear. 

“Well, whataya going to do about it?” she squealed.

I turned from the door of 2C to greet Mrs Harp. She stood in worn pink nightgown and matching fluffy slippers, her face thickly painted in makeup. In her hand, which more than anything resembled a bloody claw owing to the length and color of her nails, was a half-filled glass which she waved around for emphasis. Behind her stood the neighbor, looking embarrassed and anxious to be rid of Mrs Harp.

“Well!?” she repeated, “Whataya going to do? My little dogs are in there with that fiend!”

The dogs inside apartment 2C, hearing their mistress’ voice, began to bark ferociously. More dogs inside joined the barking, there must have been four or five of them now. 

Changing her tone, Mrs Harp leaned over to say through the door, “My poor, poor darlings. Don’t be frightened. Mommy will be with you soon. The nice man is going to take away the mean, old, bad man.” 

Then, having finished speaking to her darlings, she changed from loving Mommy to angry Munchkin, shrieking at me, “Do something, you idiot!”

I turned from Mrs Harp and knocked again on the door of 2C. Pounded, really, because one couldn’t hear themselves think with all the racket from the howling inside. It sounded as if Beelzebub’s very own hound of hell, three-headed Cerberus, had been shrunk to the size of a Chihuahua and then joined the Lapdogs of the Baskervilles inside, baying for the pure blood of the innocent.

If there be any innocents left. 

I pounded on the door again, trying not to sound like a flabbergasted cop. 

“Javier?!” I called. “It’s me, Flasher! From the office. Open up, will ya? The boss sent me. Hey, Javier!”

“Screw off!” was shouted loudly from behind the door.

“Javier!” I pleaded. “Come on! Open up, mate!”

The door opened a crack and Javier looked out with panic in his eyes. “Tell that loco to get out of here before I come out, man!” he said.

Then, seeing Mrs Harp behind me, he started to shut the door. Thinking fast, I stuck my foot in the doorway just in time to have it nicely slammed.

“OW!” I cried.

I may have been thinking fast, but I wasn’t thinking smart, because seeing the door was impeded for some reason and would not close, Javier pulled it back and slammed it again, harder this time, into my foot.

“OW!” I screamed again. I looked into Javier’s face. He looked crazy.

“She’s crazy!” he screamed.

“Who’s crazy? You mean Mrs Harp?” I couldn’t think for the pain in my foot.

“She tried to seduce me, man! Go on, ask her!”

“I never touched him!” she screeched. “Crybaby!”

“Come out and let’s go!” I pleaded. “There’s a crowd forming.”

“Yeah!” Mrs Harp screeched. “No one’s going to seduce you now, crybaby.” 

The door opened and what seemed like a million little dogs streamed out and began yipping and barking at our feet. Then, timidly, out stepped Javier. He was from South America, Honduras I believe, about forty years old, a small man. He hadn’t been at Empire Messenger Service more than a few days. The dogs at our feet barked insanely. Javier’s frightened eyes stared at Mrs Harp.

“Keep her away!” he ordered. “She’s loco, man!”

“Okay,” I said, “Okay. Nobody’s going to ...” 

Mrs Harp was suddenly upon Javier, strangling him ferociously and kicking at his shins.

“Asshole!” she screamed. “Keep away from my dogs!” 

“Oh! Ow!” gurgled Javier. “I like dogs, lady!”

“Let’s get out of here,” I said, attempting to separate them. Meanwhile, Mrs Harp’s dogs had continued to snip and yip at our heels. We were ankle deep in the little critters. 

“Let’s go!” I yelled and with a tug freed Javier from Mrs Harp. Javier and I ran for the elevator, elbowing aside the curious tenants who blocked our way. 

“Where’s your badge?” demanded the crabby one as I brushed past.

Behind us, Mrs Harp unleashed her lapdogs. 

“Sick em, my darlings!” she cackled. 

To be continued…

“If I Hear of Anything, I’ll Let You Know.”

NYC 1987

“If I Hear of Anything, I’ll Let You Know.” 

We’d flown in from New Zealand and were sleeping on the floor of Andrew’s apartment on Seventh Avenue.

From there to begin our new life in America! 

But our money was going fast.

Of course, being artists, we didn’t have much to begin with. 

It didn’t last long in the city. We spent it like fools, of course, seeing the sights and having fun. Andrew knew some interesting people so every night it was something new! 

After only twelve days, we had spent about half of what we could spare. Arithmetic was never my strong suit, being as I said an artist, but at this rate I figured we’d be broke by next Tuesday afternoon, any way you added it up. 

So, with reluctance because it had been a great holiday, I realized it was time for me to start looking for a job. 

In a bookstore on 64th Street that specialized in the theater I found a volume listing New York City theater arts producers, film and TV companies, advertising agencies, and the like. It was a massive tome, ridiculously expensive, exhaustive in its listings, covering every conceivable kind of show business enterprise. 

Even wig cleaners and piano tuners were listed.

I hadn’t realized how much talent it takes to light up old Broadway.

I started calling them, one by one. Not the piano cleaners or wig tuners, of course, not at first, but I called any company that sounded remotely as if they might be interested in animation or needing an animator. 

Each morning after breakfast at the apartment I would take a stack of quarters downstairs to the Greek diner, say hello to Nick, have a cup of strong coffee and start dialing at the pay phone in the corner, pencil poised over notebook to write down any leads I might be given. 

Of course, non were forthcoming. I exhausted the actual animation production companies on the first morning. Even in a city as large as New York, there were just a handful. 

Then it was on to theater companies, film studios, advertising agencies, etc.

Nobody was very interested. 

Most of them didn’t even want to see my demo reel. 

“Why can’t I get through?” I used to ask myself. 

It was frustrating. 

You’d think I was trying to make an appointment to come in and take a big, steaming crap in the middle of the conference room while their dear old mother was forced to watch, after I had first fornicated, very verbally and roughly, with the office copying machine, the way they were responding to me. 

It was always, “I’m sorry, we don’t do much animation. Where’d you say you were from? You’ve got a funny accent. Australia? Yeah. Sorry.”

“I’m from New Zealand,” I said. “But I’ll change to an Aussie if it’ll help me get a job! Do you know anybody that’s doing animation? Perhaps you have a name of someone I could call?”

“Nope. If I do hear of anything, I’ll let you know. Good luck.”

“But you don’t have my telephone num...” 

Click.

And that was one of my more successful calls.

At least I got to talk to somebody.

Never Get Off The Merry-Go-Round! (Pt 4)

What our friends didn’t understand was that Suzie and I felt we had nothing to lose. 

After all, everything we owned fitted into just three suitcases! 

Suzie’s eyes sparkled with excitement at the idea of America. She liked to travel and see new things. That’s why she became a travel agent. That, and to earn enough money to eat as I’ve explained. She had tremendous curiosity about the world and was remarkably free of emotional tethers to places and things. 

Suzie was a wanderer. A true free spirit. A rock-and-roll angel.

“We’re not waiting for our ship to come in, Nicky,” she’d said a few weeks before, when we told Nick and his wife of our decision to leave New Zealand. “We’re going to swim out to it!” 

We talked it over with them. That’s when I first saw the look from our friends. The look that said you’re crazy to go and try animation in America! Making cartoons? You’re barely eking out a living now, how will you survive the mean streets of New York City? 

In his youth Nick had done some O.E. (Overseas Experience) in the States, so he understood its allure. He and Suzie had worked together for years in the travel business too, so he understood her pretty well. He even understood me to some extent. 

Nick was good with people. 

It was animation that he couldn’t understand. He’d watched me work at it obsessively over the years and never seem to get ahead. Which was true, we weren’t very far ahead, as far as money and things of that nature. But we’d seen the world a bit and done a few things, Suzie and I, so I wasn't concerned about how far ahead or behind we were.

It helps tremendously in life to be young and stupid, sometimes. 

Nick turned from me and embraced Suzie. They were special friends, he and her, she having worked for him from the beginning and helped to grow his travel agency in downtown Onehunga.* 

“Keep the home fires burning, sweetie!” laughed Suzie in he musical voice. “Shame. We’ll be back before you know it.” 

She kissed Nick’s cheek, leaving a smear of lipstick, before adding, “I just want to look at America and take in the sights. It ought to be fun!” 

“Keep in touch, Suzie,” said Nick. “The place won’t be the same without you.”

I could easily believe that. 

Suzie laughed again and Nick couldn’t help but join her. 

Suzie’s laughter was like champagne, bubbly and bright and hard to resist.

I tugged her arm.

“C’mon!” I said and we began to run for gate seven.

*Pronounced "Oh-knee-hun-gah." 

Never Get Off The Merry-Go-Round!

Auckland, NZ, 1987 

“Goodbye,” I said softly, hugging my stepmother.

“Take care Rusty,” she said. “Good luck.” 

I’d never lived under the same roof as my stepmother, my dad married her when I’d already left home, but we were friendly enough.

“Thanks, Jenny,” I answered. “See you in a few years.” 

That’s what I believed, that I’d return to New Zealand after a few years away. We’d done it before a couple of times, my wife Suzie and I. We’d gone off for awhile to Africa in the seventies and Australia in the eighties, but always we’d come back.

If you’ve lived there you’ll know… New Zealand is a difficult place to stay away from. 

Nevertheless most Kiwis in those days went out to see the world. They probably still do. New Zealand being a small country made of islands in the South Pacific ocean, you have to go overseas to go anywhere. 

New Zealanders even had a phrase for it; 

“Getting your O.E.” 

Overseas Experience. 

Now we stood in the Departures Lounge of Auckland International Airport, embracing family and friends before we boarded our plane to go and do it again. 

America this time. 

New York City, where we had chums upon whose couch we could crash. 

I watched Suzie hug my father goodbye. She’d lost her father tragically when she was very young, and I think she loved my dad all the more for it. 

But it wasn’t all lovey-dovey between them, not in the beginning. When I first started going out with Suzie my father was disappointed I’d taken up with a girl so much younger, and while I was still legally married, too. 

He’s quite religious and he hoped that I would return to my first wife and the baby and do the right thing (as he saw it). But I was past all that before I’d even met Suzie. He blamed her anyway, as if she were some Bathsheba who with her sensuous charms was luring me away from the straight and narrow.

“My dad’s religious and sometimes he’s got some crazy ideas,” I said to Suzie when he refused to have anything to do with her. 

“The stupid old fart,” I added with a laugh. 

“Shame,“ she said. Which if you know a South African means almost anything. It could be shame you got fired from your job, shame you won a million in the lottery, shame the baby looks so cute. 

“Oh well, that’s his problem,” she added, and immediately forgot about my dad and his problem. She laughed and said nothing more. She was wise that way and besides, Suzie was never very good at being angry or holding a grudge. 

Turns out my father wasn’t very good at it either, because within a few months his heart softened. All it took was a chance meeting in Albert Park. He and Suzie met by accident in the botanical garden and I suppose, surrounded by all that beauty and believe me the gardens of New Zealand are extremely beautiful, they inadvertently shared a smile or a gesture that said life was too short to stay angry with each other.

I imagine that’s what happened. I know them both pretty well and I can visualize it that way. Suzie has very expressive eyes that have a way of inviting you in… 

I wasn’t there. I was in Milford Sound on a video shoot. 

My father, caught by his good manners, invited Suzie to tea in the cafe a few steps away by the fern garden. 

“We talked and talked,” said Suzie to me on the telephone that night. “Why didn’t you tell me your dad was such a sweetie?”

“Sweetie?” I asked. “My dad?”

She must have got the wrong dad, I figured. 

But no, it was really him. He called me that night also. 

“Why didn’t you tell me about her, son?” he asked me. “She’s terrific!

To be continued...

Prologue to the 11th Re-Write

Being a writer isn’t easy.

Some writers work and struggle all their lives for their art, yet never find what you or I would call ‘success.’

Not me though.

I found mine on the backseat of a NYC taxi in 2007. 

Almost sat on it. 

It lay on the backseat, gleaming in the watery light which filtered through the taxi’s windows. 

A typewritten manuscript. 

“Where to, Mack?” asked the taxi driver.

“Lafayette and Bleeker,” I answered.

The driver grunted and put the car into gear.

As the taxi began moving I picked up the manuscript beside me. It bore no title. No author’s name or address anywhere on it, either. It was dogeared and well thumbed, with notes scribbled on the margins in soft blue pencil.

Over 500 pages. 

I hefted it. 

Heavy… with promise?

I turned down the volume in my earbuds and leaned forward. Dylan’s wail reduced to a whisper in my ears. 

“Hey!” I said to the driver through the thick plastic barrier that separated us, “This yours?”

“Huh?” he replied.

“You a writer?” I asked, raising my voice to get through the plastic and lifting up the manuscript for him to see in his rearview mirror. “You write this?”

His eyes in the mirror shifted to meet mine. Without turning around, he barked, “Do I look like a fucking writer, Mack?” 

I couldn’t see all of him from where I was in the backseat. Just his shoulders and the back of his head and of course, his eyes in the mirror. He had crazy eyes, wild yet fiercely focused, but every taxi driver in NYC had those. 

Occupational hazard, probably. 

He grunted again and his eyes in the mirror returned to the road ahead.

No, he didn’t look like a writer. From the back, with his pointy little head atop massive sloping shoulders, he looked more like an axe murderer. Especially with those eyes of his. But I couldn’t be sure, never having met one that I know of. This was New York City, though, where I lived on and off for twenty years, I could’ve met any number of axe murderers by now and not known it. 

New York City.

What a town!

Hell, I thought, I should write a book about it.

But that was my problem. 

I couldn’t write a book about anything.

I was a writer who couldn’t write.

Writer’s block, fear of failure, creative incompetence, call it what you will. It was that and more. As an author I’d spent my entire career farting around on the edges, never unleashing the artistic greatness I was sure was within me.

“You’ve got to shit or get off the pot!” my ex-wife used to say, for she considered my problem to be one of commitment. 

My lack of it.

Or was it that I ought to be committed?

It doesn’t matter now, she’s finally happy. She got tired of waiting for this great defecation of mine she so strongly urged, and soon after left to join the circus as a bareback rider and part-time fortuneteller (two occupations she was by nature ideally suited for), eventually becoming the mistress of The Great Scarletti.

He was the lion tamer.

He’ll need to be, I thought at the time.

But that was long ago.

We’ve all passed a lot of water under the bridge since then.

Now I’d found an abandoned, unpublished book.

I stared out the taxi’s window into the wet afternoon, wondering who had left the manuscript behind. And when? Only moments ago? And why no title? Who was the author? What was their story? Did they think so little of their work that they left it on the seat of a NYC taxicab?

To be found by me, a writer who’d give his soul for a good story.

Ha! Ha! How the gods love a laugh!

Outside, it was the usual afternoon traffic jam on Seventh Ave, compounded by the icy rain. We were going nowhere fast, so instead of telling the driver I’ve found something back here, and hearing him croak “Whadaya fucking want me to do about it, Mack?” I thought I’d just read a few pages of the thing and leave the driver to his driving.

I’d tell him about it later, when we arrived at Bleeker and Lafayette.

Besides, my curiosity was killing me.

So I started to read. 

It was a novel about a boy. 

There wasn’t anything remarkable about this boy. No great heritage or lofty ancestry. No display of childhood genius. Nothing to foretell of his accomplishments to come, if any. He was just a daydreaming kid from California who liked to draw. 

And then, just before his fifteenth birthday, he and his family moved to New Zealand. 

The other side of the world.

“Lafayette and Bleeker!”

“Huh?” 

“Lafayette and Bleeker. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

I looked up from the manuscript. 

“This side of the street okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Thanks. What do I owe you?”

“Eight and a half bucks, Mack.”

I gave him a ten and took the manuscript with me.