Goin' back

Sunday column

There is an Easter that lives on and on in my memory and it really was the most uneventful  thing. Uneventful, and I was as happy as a clam.

It was 1979, second year of university. Home was an old two-storey house in Boulcott St, across from Press House; one flat up, one flat down, three or four flatmates: my mate Spider and me and whoever else might have drifted in that month. 

The owner, Mrs Varuhas, lived in Island Bay, worked on the production line at GM in Trentham, called in each week to collect the rent. She called me in her strong Romanian accent Mr Slacks. Her sentences began with No well, a kind of Eastern European yeah nah. 

No well Mr Slacks, tomorrow my son comes to  fix the spouting

No well Mr Slacks, next month the rent goes up

The CBD was not really, back  then, made for inner city living but you could make it work. A drink was a short walk in any direction: the St George Hotel, Barretts, the Romney Arms. For disco nightclub beats and a pricey dismal waste of time there was Slack Alice.

Around the corner on Willis St the butchery Prestons Meats could meet all your chuck steak and mince requirements and also rabbit. There was also some kind of 4 Square.

On the next block the Casablanca steakhouse had a jukebox machine at each table while you waited for your rump steak and potato salad and plate of buttered bread for, god I can’t remember now, 3 dollars?

Next to that was the San Francisco Bathhouse when it really was a bathhouse. You got a wave of eucalyptus and cigarette smoke as you opened the door and you could get yourself a sauna and even more exotic offers too but we were just there for the pool tables at 20c a game and maybe a Nutoata bar and an orange juice if we felt like splashing out. 

Later the Willis Street Village would open and there would be pizzas made from scratch where they actually rolled out the dough in front you and this would be absolutely the life, nothing like you’d ever seen or devoured in Feilding. 

Your fun could be just sitting at the window and looking out on the street. Late each night one Dominion bus and then another and another would light up and come lumbering out, huge beasts laden with fresh newspapers for Napier and Whanganui, Waipukurau and Palmerston North. ln daylight hours a stream of people made their way homewards and there was an uneven never-mended asphalt hump lying in wait and there would be a stumble, a trip, and a look back over the shoulder in bewilderment or a glowering at the unresponsive clump of footpath. You could make bets about it. 

But that Easter, none of that was happening because in 1979 Easter was still a fully closed down time of nothing. Also, the weather was fully shit; possibly because it fell late in April that year; possibly because - and please don't take this the wrong way Wellington readers Linda and Linda -  but you can for sure beat it on a day when the wind and rain are both horizontal with maximum prejudice.

I was the only one there in the flat and possibly in the entire inner city. And so I turned on the two bar electric heater in the little brick fireplace and hunkered down. I saw no one, went nowhere, just made hot buttered crumpets and cups of tea, played a tranquil contemplative new Neil Young album called Comes a Time and read some historical novel, no idea now what the title or author might have been. It had Ireland, the potato famine, sailing ships, possibly there were bodices and Roger the cabin boy and what have you, I just know I was wholly entertained and absorbed. 

It was Orwellian, the whole scene, and by that I mean Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a very modestly appointed flat with a tiny gas cooker, a toilet with a chain handle hanging from the cistern above, a striking red vinyl 1950s couch.

All that weekend I just stayed inside out of the rain. I loved it. I was content. I don't mean to say I loved it so much I made a point of doing the same thing the following Easter or in fact any Easter ever again, but it was 42 years ago, and there it is: still vivid in my memory, long after so many other ones - drinking, partying, horses, various states of shamble - are just a vague blur.

Music, food and reading is maybe the point. You can dress it up, you can dress it down, but fancy Waiheke holiday home or propped up by a one bar heater, it can be largely the same holiday; the music, the book, the food.

What I can't at all locate in this memory is working at the pub. It was a huge part of my life that year, especially the Saturdays. It must have been that I wasn’t established there yet, in April, as Slacky who we ring whenever we’re short. 

I started there in January. Sick of getting saturated in chicken fat at Homestead Chicken I opened the Yellow Pages and worked my way alphabetically down the pubs. B for Brunswick Arms in Willis St.

Yes their bottle store guy is going on holiday and they need someone to cover for him, and how soon can I be there? Four minutes on my Yamaha.  It’s a rugby pub and they look warily at students. I’m two years shy of legal working age for the job but I lie about it well enough to satisfy them and mostly they just need a body in front of the cash register tomorrow because they had completely forgotten that Smiler was going on holiday.

So in I go and it’s Rose Royce on the radio singing Love Don’t Live Here Anymore and the radio is always 2ZB, not at all my thing, and the regulars rolling in each day for their flagons and gin bottles, and we get on well enough and I do the job right but they’re still not sure about students and when Smiler’s holiday finishes, they say thanks see you later good luck up at the uni.

But then someone gets sick and they’re on the phone and then someone quits and I’m there again and they’re getting to like me more and then suddenly I’m there two and three and four nights a week and fitting it around second year law which you’re supposed to take Very Seriously, but I also take money seriously and now  I’m doing Saturday mornings and now I’m doing Friday nights and all day Saturday from 10 in the morning to ten at night and I am watching and getting to know whole other worlds. 

I was there for the money but I was getting something else too. There were people, types of people that I would not otherwise have met, would not otherwise have wanted to meet,  some I couldn’t stand on sight and I was obliged to learn to get along with them. This made me a better person, this also took me down new roads I’d only come to see later were a not good idea.   

So many kinds of people; but in one respect all one kind of person: the kind that does a hell of a lot of drinking. The guy with the haunted expression who I would come to know had been a quiet smiling regular, everyone’s mate and then his drunk driving one night took someone’s life. The ebullient barrister in the public bar,  hilarious, everyone's friend, the guy you went to if you had  a problem. People would say of him John would have done a lot longer stretch for that drink driving if it hadn’t have been for Graeme.

There were the Colenso advertising people, there were wharfies and dusties, there was Bernie Galvin from the PM’s office and Margaret Clark pulling into the drive-thru to pick up a bottle and Sam Hunt in his big old Valiant who paid with a business size chequebook and a magnificent flourish; sad pensioners who got you to order them a taxi to Gordon Wilson Flats and on Friday and Saturday night all of Wellington dressed up rolled through the bottle store to get their Blenheimer and their Fosters and they were happy for party time. And amongst it all one night there was the regular bottle of gin a day guy and today his face was chalk white against the stubble, and a small trickle of blood was running from the corner of his mouth down his chin, and he still insisted you sell him the bottle.

Regulars had accounts, and their addresses gave me a Wellington geography lesson: Vogelmorn bowling club, Maranui surf club, Epuni, Linden.

A gregarious sex worker who drove a  vivid yellow Monaro would pull in with Korean guys from the squid boats and walk them through the Single Malt selection. Bob Moodie walked past each afternoon in his kaftan but never came in.

Steadily I also acquired a fuller understanding of how business work, and what a boss looks for in an employee. One quiet night I was sitting at the bottle store office desk taking advantage of the quiet to do some study. The boss came across to see how things were going, I told him very quiet I've been able to get heaps of study. He didn't look  as thrilled as I expected.

And the money! Let me tell you about the money!  Younger readers, believe it or not there was once a time, thanks to Union representation, when hospo pay rates were pretty bloody good. For evening shifts I got paid time and a half. For the first eight hours on Saturday: double time. And for the remaining hours that day: triple time. Some weeks my little brown weekly pay envelope would be absolutely stuffed with notes.

Yamaha paid for with penal rates, Athol Crescent, 1979

Just to blur things a little: those penal rates recognised the imposition of having to give up your weekend and your evenings. In my student existence, a Saturday was no different to a Tuesday really, and evenings ran through to 3am long after closing time. Later when I got a delivery job at an ad agency, people would ask how was your weekend? and I would be baffled. Why? Was this a trick question? What was the big deal about the weekend?  I learned soon enough.

Does this mean penal rates would be wasted on casual students in hospo today? Oh hell no. The only question to be asked is: does this wage provide enough to live decently? The answer is obviously: no, not by a long long way. A fair deal has been sorely eroded. 

Loyal supporter of this newsletter and dogged defender of workers rights Maxine Gay has been fighting the good fight on Twitter this Easter about ramifications of businesses flouting the trading rules. Low wage workers get a raw enough deal as it is, should an incursion into what would otherwise be a time of rest just be blithely waved through? 

Life doesn't so much have defined turning points as moments when you catch sight of something and begin to incorporate it.

Lockdown this time last year gave us a fresh experience of time out, making more of less. We liked it, I think, a lot of us.

That pub year, that quiet Easter year, I caught sight of things, made changes, did some growing up, coloured  in some deficiencies, learned more about fitting in, found focus to go to the law library and use my available time well, and cheers for making me do that, old mate Spider.

At the end of that year, Spider went home for the summer and other mates moved in, and I now responded to the other part of my personality: the bit that says fuck yeah let's party, albeit, then, with the slightest bit more of a grasp on getting along with other people.

It was quite the summer, partying in Boulcott St until I stuffed my pack, pointed the bike north for Sweetwaters and told the flatmates see you there in a week. Off I rode to Whanganui while they went on enjoying The Wall into the early hours of the morning. 

On behalf of his young family, the French teacher in the downstairs flat politely asked if they would mind keeping it down and they told him sure no worries mate but come the next night and a crate of Red Band they’re singing Teacher Leave Those Kids Alone louder and louder.

No, well.

When the flatmates arrived at Sweetwaters they handed me a little scrap of paper from Mrs Varuhas. It read, simply:

Mr Slacks I give you two weeks notes