I glance down at my boots and see a small mammal's grinning jawbone, complete with teeth, splotches of fur and the remains of a tiny, leathery nose. I imagine it was skinned and its hide added to the tall stack of skins I saw on a shelf inside, then the remains thrown out to the porch. Four terrier dogs scurry around my ankles, pawing at my knees for attention.
The inside of the house is dim, the purple walls scribbled with permanent marker: "Things you own ending up owning you!," "Money is just paper with ink on it!," "12th Feb Sheis Biday." Every surface in sight is covered in clutter: old bottles, tools, newspapers, boxes, items I don't recognize. A vacuum rests against a clothing-covered sofa. I sit in a sagging orange armchair.
Mad Mack sits at a table, his wiry white hair sticking up at odd angles, silhouetted from the kitchen light behind him. He has soft blue eyes, a shade of gray stubble in his chin and a silver hoop in his left earlobe. I've seen him several times since we arrived, and each time he's been wearing a multi-colored fleece pullover decorated with diamonds and squares. A friend of Kerry's, Mack kindly came to retrieve us at the end of the Catlins River Track and brought us back to his home. We hopped out of the truck and into a junkyard of wooden pallets, plastic tubs, cans, metal ladders and other detritus. Mack led us through a dark hallway to his living room where he served us coffee.
To call him eccentric would be entirely understating. He calls himself a dinosaur and a caveman, but he's really just well-lived. His stories are many and often comedic: an army pilot dressed in full-on formal drag for a Vietnam air raid, a party at a Singapore hotel with thousands of transvestites, Janis Joplin hitting him over the head with a whiskey bottle at Woodstock in '69. "They told me she was gonna boink me after she smacked me. Dammit, Janis, you owe me!" he shouts, fist wagging in the air.
But there's an air of seriousness, even sadness, to Mack, too. It's not loneliness - he has many companions in his dogs, friends and lovers - but rather the melancholic disappointment of a man who no longer relates - or wants to relate - to the world in which he lives. He laments the ever-growing dominance of capitalism, though he doesn't know what system could replace it. He waxes nostalgic about the cool, lakeside hippie village that was Queenstown before it became a tourist mecca. He's appalled that something he bought for $30 in 1973 costs $500 now, and cell phone companies expect you to make one call a month to keep your phone plan, and writing is a rapidly dying subject in schools.
Listening to Mack makes me miss an era that I never knew, but I'm also uplifted by him: living proof of all the things, all the experiences and chaos and heartbreak and knowledge you can fit into a lifetime. I was inspired, a little frightened, and definitely amused. Particularly when a neighbor drove by with a pile of rubbish on his way to the dump, and Mack insisted the man unload all the "perfectly good" stuff into his yard. Hoarder? Maybe. Legend? Definitely.
MICROWAVE MAILBOX!
