– I wrote this post at bar in Wellington, New Zealand in 2010, shortly after my Australian visa expired. New Zealand was an adventure in and of itself, but at this point I was spending my days in solitude taking photographs, visiting museums and thinking back to the Australian adventures I’d just had. –
“La porta è sempre aperta, la luce è sempre accesa” – The door is always open, the light is always on. – from Aggiungi un posto a tavola, a song by Armando Trovajoli written for the omonimous italian musical comedy.
Moreover, if the door was closed, opening it would release a cloud of smoke into the atmosphere capable of intoxicating a small army.
The two moldy couches are always occupied by random individuals in a vegetative state who are hypnotized by the television screen and move only to wipe the drool off their mouth or receive a joint.
This was the day to day at the place I once called home in Bondi Beach; a sort of private hostel that was more like an illegally occupied house.
I found it in the usual way: friends of friends were in Sydney, which led to me getting invited to a party and the rest, as they say, is history.
There was one night when someone busted out the guitar and we decided to improvise a song about Imperial Avenue, which despite just being a house somehow acquired the name of the entire street. The first ten verses were about the chicken bones on the table and the dirty dishes in the sink, both indispensable attributes of this micro-community. Then came the description of Michael the owner, nicknamed “leech” for obvious reasons. He would get viciously teased about his toupee the moment he walked through the door, yet he always found an excuse to drop in on his tenants. He was in the neighborhood and thought he’d stop by to replace one of the old mattresses (we never did get to the bottom of the never ending mattress swap), and while he was out, he somehow got fifty donuts for the price of five thanks to his friend (Michael liked to remind us that he had the ‘right kind’ of friends).
At the sight of those donuts, the comatose couch potatoes suddenly mutate into hyenas who attack said box of donuts, emptying it in nanoseconds. The box will then remain on the kitchen floor for at least a couple of weeks before someone, tripping over it, will wonder if perhaps the appropriate time has come to throw it away. After long and careful ponderation, the verdict is ‘YES’; but seeing as all the trash cans (plastic bags hanging in “strategic” places) are full, the individual takes to scratching his head. At this point he has forgotten what he was thinking about, let alone why he was even in the kitchen in the first place. Alas he abandons the room, the mission and the box.
As the general household vibe varied, so would the type of greeting I’d receive upon my arrival (I was only there on weekends as a guest, like I said I spent my weeks taking care of horses outside of the city); but it would mainly depend on the day’s drug of choice.
Let me explain: if everyone was stoned, I could have easily robbed every single room of the house, certain that I would go by unnoticed in plain sight (this actually happened at one point, though I wasn’t the thief! I still feel for that poor french girl who came home to no more MacBook).
The weekends, for example, were spent drinking. Heavily. So if I was arriving on a Friday night I could expect kisses, hugs and rejoicing from my tipsy on that boxed wine friends (yes, I said boxed).
One night the French boys returned from a rave still under the influence of LSD. I was awakened at four in the morning from what could have been a hit show at a gay bar: four guys in their tighty-whities rubbing their bodies against the walls and trying to swim across the hall, belly down on the carpeting. The sounds they were making could have been the soundtrack for a nature documentary about the Amazon. The fascinating part was that they seemed to have discovered tact for the first time, something I realized as I watched these supposedly straight boys uncontrollably caress each other.
Imperiàl (pronounced the French way, as 80% of the tenants were French), is a place of perdition and a gathering of the dissolute. Yet sitting here in chilly New Zealand, it warms my heart to remember that place. I was never denied a bed, a mattress or a moldy couch to sleep on; and let me tell you: after spending a week in solitude in the country shoveling horse shit, I could not wait to go back.
I think back to Julienne and Anna who, between cigarettes, began to formulate increasingly sensical sentences in English, thus revealing to me the beautiful people they are. In fact even those hours spent listening to conversations in French became less aggravating. Every twenty minutes or so someone would remember my existence and protest “eengleesh!”, causing everyone to fall silent. The conversation would slowly pick up again in pidgin English, until someone else remembered they had something important to add. In French, obviously.
Over time I began to understand more, and there were even times when I attempted to participate in my pidgin French, surrendered to the reality that when it comes French people, you are the one who has to adapt to them.
The Imperial Avenue era was brief, intense and full of poetry. Whether we were running through the streets of Sydney in the rain or singing along with strangers on the beach, we squeezed that fruit to the last drop, well aware that the reason it tasted so good was that we knew it would end. Soon.