Pocket transistor radio11/11/2023 ![]() In some of those timelines, I’m not here in your future to be writing you. What if you stopped diverting yourself? Or rather, diverted yourself differently? Imagine there’s streams of parallel time- lines, alternate ones, in which you come out as trans at forty, or thirty, or-right now. The thing about diversions is that you can never see what’s coming up around the turn. Diverting elsewhere with ambitions, politics, writing, some less happy pursuits. Whatever those situations point toward, you’re avoiding. With your slight frame, you’re often mistaken for a girl, and you like it. Your hair long, wearing girls’ jeans, girls’ boots. That picture of Patti Smith on the cover of Horses is your icon. Need to make contact in some way with that skinny teenage boy. You won’t listen, but I want to talk to you anyway. You want your life to be Wildean and singular. You need a city big enough to let you get weird. You were right to fuck off immediately after high school. Now back home for another brief visit in Newcastle, back to that steel, coal and port town with its belching smoke and bending beaches. Not like your upbringing at all, although there might be one thing you have in common. The intensity of it, that raving joy and surrender in a racist world of pain, poverty, and police. What he loved most was the ecstatic, stirring energy of church. He was the son of a preacher who also owned a nightclub. Little Richard left Macon, Georgia, for a life on the road, performing. You’re not living in their world again, ever. Mates again, smoking together in the car. He took it, but got his bigger mates to find you, sit you in a car and make you roll the regulation five joints out of it under threat of consequences. He complained it wasn’t much pot for five bucks. Don’t think I’ve forgotten how, hard up for cash, you sold a matchbox of weed to someone else you thought you’d left behind. You’ve just moved to Sydney from your hometown, and those skills come in handy.ĭon’t think I’ve forgotten that time you came back to Newcastle and slept on a former schoolmate’s couch rather than go visit your father. You’ve already got good at monitoring the perimeter, scanning for danger, checking you have all your kit. You feel vulnerable, fragile, too open to the randomness of the world. ![]() Bigger kids still pushed you up against a wall and took things from you, but sometimes they too could be charmed. You called them “Snazzies: the cigarette for the fancy smoker.” You made it into a bit, and everyone thought it was cute. You found an old cigarette tin, rolled pencil stubs in paper, and made them into a fake brand. ![]() They did their best, but you needed more than that, so you started looking for ways to get attention.īig brother smoked. You needed them all to not fall apart so they could hold you together. Your family tended their own wounds after your mother died. You’ve not yet learned to live in the present, so you live in the nothingness of a permanent not-yet. The past hurt you, so you move on, and want the world to move on. It is obvious to you already that a world that relies on little isolated family units subject to the whims of the market and disease is a bad idea. Like in Kimba the White Lion, that TV show you loved when you were little, you feel alone in the world. Look that last one up, it explains a lot. ![]() That made us distrustful, detached, dissociated. The two frontline adults meant to be there for us, keep the world at bay, weren’t. You don’t think about this much, but I have to insist: we lost our mother young, and we never much liked our distant, irritable father. They’ll help you in spite of your indifference, even antagonism, to care. Perhaps they see the wound that keeps you from asking. I’ll try not to advise, as you won’t take advice. You-what do I even remember of you? Our past selves are probably extensively edited editions. A letter that’s cover for a medley of others, addressed to others, about love and money, sex and death. A letter to a young poet, where the young poet is me, forty years ago, not quite twenty years old. I’m writing this to you from your own future, or a possible one at least. Then his life took a turn while crossing the waters of our harbor. He was this churning, surging flame, icon of a new thing called rock and roll. He came to Newcastle on his Australian tour, in 1957, four years before you were born. When Little Richard came to our hometown, he left us some- thing like a gift.
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