A Short History of Richard Kline (2 page)

Some books spoke directly to my heart: when I was seventeen, one of my teachers, a florid self-dramatising hippie called Tess, gave me a copy of Hermann Hesse's
Siddhartha
. I liked Tess: she had good legs and her eyes sang at me. One morning at the end of a History class she called me back from the door and, after rummaging in her big embroidered shoulder bag, produced a slim paperback.

‘It's not homework,' she said. ‘Keep it and read it when the mood strikes you.'

I read it at once, flattered by the implied comparison. It was easy enough while reading
Siddhartha
to imagine myself as a young prince, ‘strong, handsome, supple-limbed'; a boy with ‘fine, ardent thoughts'. Most of all, I identified with Siddhartha's unhappiness: ‘… there was yet no joy in his own heart. Dreams and restless thoughts came flowing to him from the river, from the twinkling stars at night, from the sun's melting rays.' There was ritual, Siddhartha perceived, and there was knowledge, but they did nothing to ‘relieve the distressed heart'.

Meanwhile my own teachers, just like Siddhartha's teachers, ‘poured the sum total of their knowledge into his waiting vessel; and the vessel was not full …'

In that phrase,
the vessel was not full
, I found consolation; found deep reassurance that my own state of discontent was not some mental leprosy that would one day corrode me into madness. If it was good enough for Siddhartha, it was good enough for me. It was irrelevant that he was brown-skinned, of royal blood and spoke in a foreign tongue. These were the superficial trappings of mere embodiment, and at its core my adolescent ego was without race or colour and knew only its own yearning, its hunger for the meeting of like minds, for acknowledgment and validation. Yes, I am not alone in how I feel;
this is how it really is
.

Of course, the body made urgent claims, and there were other distractions, mostly girls, but more often than not the feminine compounded my problem by being elusive and unknowable. There were many silent infatuations, all with a common pattern. I would begin by feeling dizzy and sick at the very sight of Her and six months later would wonder what I had seen in her. My pining would seem pathetic and absurd, but it would not prevent me succumbing again.

So many girls had that delicate beauty that left you speechless in their presence. It made you giddy, so that you wanted to throw yourself at their feet in abject worship. Others were like sleek, pampered pets. One in particular, the daughter of one of my mother's tennis friends, had a molten, animal sensuality, a complacency of being that mesmerised me. I thought of this girl every night for months. It was inconceivable that such a creature could suffer even a moment of self-doubt. And this idea was an affront to me: that she should possess something I lacked; that she should have
unearned
access to a mysterious source of well-being. That she should possess this … this essential thing.

It produced many dark fantasies that are better left undocumented here.

At nineteen I left home. I told my father I wanted to study theoretical physics.

‘Why?' Ned asked.

‘Because,' I replied, ‘only physics can unravel the riddle of the universe.'

Ned shook his head and stated categorically that I was making a bad decision, that I would not be able to support myself. In this city there were taxi drivers with physics degrees, and he wanted no child of his to embark on such an unreliable profession. ‘Look,' he said, ‘if you want to study physics, get an engineering degree.'

But I had no desire to be an engineer, a fixer, a manager of the known. Instead, with a defiant sense of chancing my luck, I enrolled in an Arts degree, majoring in pure mathematics and medieval history.

Ned was furious. It was the first time I had seen him not just angry but enraged. There was more than one shouting match, but I had a scholarship and I was prepared to get casual work if I had to. It was time to leave home.

For the first two years of my studies I lived in a run-down student terrace in Newtown with mattresses on the floor and an outside dunny. At night and into the early morning I served watered-down spirits from behind the bar of the Purple Parrot, a louche nightclub in King Street. The licensee of the Parrot was a middle-aged Londoner known as Coop who had served with the British SAS, or at least that's what he told the staff, his ‘boys'.

I was fascinated by Coop, for he was the opposite of my father: exotic and venal, a pugnacious man, tall and thickset with a bald head, heavy jowls and a watery, myopic stare. He drank too much and could be extremely rude, but in his good moods he was charming. And he seemed to like me. ‘Hello, old dear,' he'd say when I arrived for work, and he would pat me on the shoulder as if I were a favourite nephew. ‘I've got you sussed,' he'd say, ‘you're smarter than the others.' Sometimes after closing he would go into the kitchen and cook for the staff, and his food was always better than the chef's. It had a delicacy that was surprising. But when roused he could be vicious and would brawl with the lethal economy of the soldier he once was.

As I got to know Coop I saw that he was neither a good man nor a bad one; he could be rude, savage and sadistic, yet he could also be generous and at times sentimental. When sober he treated the club's patrons with elaborate courtesy, but when drunk he would harass them out of the club and shut the doors. Then he would order his ‘boys' to open some French reds and we would sit around while he reminisced about his army days. In those early morning hours a certain mood would come over him, an uncanny melancholy threaded through with menace.

Or, if he was in a roistering mood, we would move on to the small apartment he kept in Glebe for his all-night parties, where occasionally he would orchestrate a live sex performance. Here he kept a riding crop mounted on the wall, and it was no mere ornament since what he wanted most was to be beaten and humiliated. More than once I wandered into the lavatory for a leak only to stumble over Coop, down on his knees and pleading with some startled young woman, perched on the bowl with her knickers around her ankles, to urinate on him. Not that he was ever fazed at my intrusion. ‘Hello, old dear,' he'd say, and, gazing up at the girl looming above him, he would smile, beatifically. ‘All I want is for her to piss on me. It's not much to ask, is it?' Then he would sigh. ‘Isn't she beautiful?' They were all beautiful.

After I graduated I looked around and thought: what now? On the recommendation of the father of a friend I joined an oil company as a trainee manager and worked for eighteen months in a state of casual boredom. One of my achievements was to reduce the number of forms used in the personnel section from nineteen to three. For this I was commended as a ‘thinker'. Though I liked the men I worked with, the job demanded too little of me. After six months I enrolled in intensive night classes in the new science of computing and found I was a natural. I was one of the first. Within two years I was working for a new start-up company in Chatswood.

By then I had moved on from the Parrot. I couldn't be bothered with its self-conscious wickedness. It was the striving to be wicked, the desperate contrivance of it, that bored me, not sex itself. I do not want to give the wrong impression here, since there was never a time in my youth when I wasn't consumed by the intensity of my sexual cravings. But what I sought was a loss of self that blotted out the critical intellect, not sharpened it – something to switch off the thinking mind.

And it was my experience that this could never be contrived, that it came at you unexpectedly and often from the most unlikely places; could spring out of the mundane like a scarlet flower blooming through a crack in a stone wall. What I wanted was to lose myself in the moment, to be in a place so utterly right that all sense of separation would fall away. I wanted more than sex, I wanted communion, but this ‘wanting' was more in the thinking than in the living, and my relationships with women were erratic. I lost interest easily; needed to be able to do what I liked on impulse without consulting anyone; was not one of those young men who was prepared to settle gratefully into an early marriage, de facto or otherwise. Sometimes the idea of love – love that would hold me captive and abject – was terrifying.

Only sex could blot out my painful awareness of separation, and the more reckless, the better. There was an affair with an older married woman that led to me being king-hit at a party in Bondi. An irate husband appeared on the scene and suddenly I had an inkling of how callow I was, that some people were playing for higher stakes, that their whole world was in the balance, whereas I was just looking for illicit kicks, a kind of hit-and-run fix. And it could be good, that fix, it could be
very
good: purging, cathartic. Afterwards you felt a lightness of being, like all your blood had been run through a white-hot crystal and cleansed of its dross. Sometimes at the point of orgasm I thought the rush would consume me forever.

By then I was in my mid-twenties and already beginning to feel a slight decline in my physical powers. One evening, while drinking with an old schoolfriend, I was induced to take up jogging, persuaded that it could give me an endorphin high. In fact, after only a few weeks it gave me a sprained ankle, but the pack I jogged with had a drink once a week in a karaoke bar, and at one of these sessions I encountered Jo Chalmers.

The thing that first attracted me to Jo was her voice: warm, and spliced with a wry humour. She was the only person I had seen who could sing karaoke and look natural, neither vain nor awkward. She was there with a group from work, and after she sang I went over, three parts shot, and asked her out. ‘Call me in the morning when you're sober,' she said. And I did.

We lived together for four years, and although we never married I still think of her as my first wife. The commitment is the same, whatever they tell you, and the break just as hard. To be fair to Jo, for much of the time I was with her I was distracted; spent long hours at work and assumed she would understand. Her own work was demanding too, and there were weeks when we talked for longer on the phone than we did in our small apartment. And maybe it was her voice I fell in love with: just listening to her sing in the shower could lift my spirits. But best of all I liked to hear her sing in the car when we went on long trips together, often to Canberra to visit her parents. And together up and down the Hume Highway we would work our way through hits from the sixties and seventies to which Jo always knew the words, crazy songs like ‘Li'l Red Riding Hood', and then we would howl all along the freeway, and laugh until we were light-headed and veering into the white line.

When other people clowned they were embarrassing; when Jo was silly she enlarged, she broke open the frame. At her best she had a gift for joyful trivia that could short-circuit my analytical logic, my restless discontent. But when she was angry her anger seethed like volcanic lava trapped beneath tectonic plates, and then she would withdraw from me, and I from her, and we would play games with one another, serious war-like manoeuvres carried out on a plane of mute hostility until we both were locked into a silence that neither could find a way out of. As time went on, our life together evolved into painful periods of unspoken resentment, punctuated by increasingly lukewarm periods of truce.

And all through this time I continued to feel that strange blend of passion and detachment, of yearning and apathy, which made nonsense of the world beyond the strict, organising logic of my work. There were days when I felt an electrifying spark propel me through the day, but then there were days when everything seemed hollow, a cheerless merry-go-round, and it was an immense effort to get out of bed. Though many people thought of me as a workaholic, as obsessive, it was as if the system had crashed and I would have to lie prone on my back and run the instructions through my head: ‘Now get up, then have a shower, then have some breakfast. Don't skip it, you'll regret it later. Then walk to the train, take your time if you have to, if you're late it won't matter, just get there, one step at a time …' After half an hour of lying there, rehearsing the moves in my head, talking myself into it, finally I would throw back the covers. Sometimes, just occasionally, I would sink back and plead a virus, but mostly I would get up and work my way through the program. And by mid-morning it would be okay, which is not to say that by the next morning the malaise wouldn't have re-settled over me, like fog descending in the night, and I would have to arc up the program again. And this could go on for days or, in a bad period, weeks. And no-one knew. Jo would just remark on me being ‘moody' or ‘sluggish' and make some crack about getting more exercise.

I could only have explained it then by saying that I in which the battery had gone flat. And it was true that simple things could recharge it for a while: a book; a walk in the bush; a swim. But there were whole weeks when I felt oppressed by the sheer ordinariness of life, its mindless repetition. Birth, death, decay, birth, death …