Where's Whalley?

A world away from home

zita_whalley — Thu, 15 May 2014 13:59:04 GMT

Melancholy hangs in the cold winter air. The biting -27’C wind permeates my clothes, my bones and the ground I tread as I navigate my way down the main street of Khuzhir, the principal but tiny township of Olkhon Island. Beyond Moscow’s halo of smog and through the hibernating, snow covered emptiness of Siberia; a frozen lake separates Olkhon Island from everything that comes before it. It is a world way from home. Away from Australia’s dry flat expanse, the sun on my face and the blue coastal skies of NSW.

Grey cloud hangs low while this backwater outpost slumbers through winter. The surrounding wilderness is rugged and raw in its beauty, an echo of Australia, despite the contrast in climate. The isolation is palpable. The geographical remoteness and severity of season ensures few visitors this time of year and as I observe my surroundings I wonder what I am doing and why.

The frozen mud streets are littered with car shells, pieces of broken machinery, frozen cowpats and packs of marauding dogs. On the short but frigid walk down to the shores of Lake Baikal I pass no one. Smoking chimneys and a corner store selling vodka and limited canned sundries which belts out Russian psych-trance, are the only signs of life.

Down at the lake the tide is frozen in time. I think of my local beach, with the sand under foot and the water swelling around me and the allure of looking out across a body of water while standing on the edge of land. Here, the peaks of low gentle waves are crisp and hard and the sandy, rocky shoreline is rigid. The pink of the sun pushes through the clouds and at the water’s edge, before the horizon, the ice of the lake meets the frost of the sky and engulfs the world in a gentle frosty fog and a beguiling serine beauty. This celestial grace and encounter with the fabled Siberian winter reminds me why I journeyed so far.

A Local Encounter that Changed my Perspective - Football. It's just a game

zita_whalley — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:54:28 GMT

The setting sun leaks a soft pink into the skyline. The thunderous noise from the sea of red, white and black painted faces, contorted with excitement and fever, rumbles across the stadium. Flags are waved high in the air as novelty horns are blown and chants are bellowed on a constant loop.
“Misr, Misr, Allahu Akbar” Egypt, Egypt, God is great.

This mantra rings joyfully hopefully and proudly through my ears, sung by tens of thousands of people giddy on the prospect of victory. The atmosphere is so contagious that even I - a keen hater of sports, and one who thinks football is particularly overrated – can’t help getting swept up in the furor of watching Egypt play Algeria in the World Cup qualifier on home turf.

Egypt and Algeria draw two all and Cairo unravels into maniacal jubilation. It doesn’t matter that victory isn’t theirs just yet because neither is defeat and triumphant potential lingers. Walking the streets homeward bound I am engulfed by a city celebrating. The cacophony of noise is deafening and streets overflow with delirium.

Parents hold their toddlers and small children out of car windows as they wave and flap Egyptian flags in the post match traffic jam – a seemingly endless vehicle stand still. People hang over balconies or out of car windows. Face painted men run and dance down pot holed streets, they lie on their backs in the middle of the road, stamping their feet and hugging their Egyptian flags in deranged euphoria. Some beat drums others light gas from aerosol cans and feverishly swing their flaming arms about. Cars crawl slowly by while motorcycles creep past them as their drivers bounce their bikes through the bedlam. All of this noise and chaos, the clapping, beating, chanting, stomping, screaming, crying, honking and bouncing is done to the rhythm of the night. Egypt. Egypt. God is great.

From my bedroom in my ninth floor apartment I can still hear the noise from the streets. It will continue into the early morning. In a country where class, religion and government divide, football is a shared faith and a unifier, it is not to be scoffed at. I fall asleep to the sound of people brought together by football, united by country and by a collective hope of what may come as well as what they have already achieved.

All highways lead to white picket fences

zita_whalley — Sat, 2 Mar 2013 23:17:00 GMT

When I finally arrive at San Diego – 22 hours later – I discover Oceanview is not a suburb of San Diego, it’s the suburbs, and more than an hour past the San Diego city limits, in and up a valley and off a couple of freeways, with no ocean in view. Not to worry however, because tomorrow Anna and the rest of the T.V production crew she is working with are moving into a McMansion in a suburban estate, located off a couple of freeways and far away from anything good, or anything bad for that matter.

Waiting for the delivery men to bring furniture and whitegoods to the empty McMansion the following morning, a glimpse of another life – if I made a few wrong turns – passes by; that I’m a suburban house mom relocating because my husband moved out here to invest in an internet start up business, with my kids at school or outside playing with rattlesnakes.

Who. The fuck. Would want to live here?

The walls are hollow and plastic, made from boat hull material, there is a maroon and grey feature wall in the living room and the master bedroom’s walk-in-wardrobe is so big you could fit a bunk bed in there. It’s a forty-minute walk to the nearest shops where you can eat a fried burrito and watch the cars zoom by or take a zumba class. The estate has a Tim Burton feel to it, as if behind the identical facades are only exposed beams and support structures, components of a larger set. Houses are decorated with smiling ceramic suns, American flags and signs that state: Bless this house and everyone in it. Bumper stickers on meaty trucks and 4WDs read Bless our troops, In God We Trust and I’m a Marine Monster.

This idea of the suburban dream is a personal hell and to not end up in one is one of the few guiding principles I follow in life. That and don’t be a dick. Invested in what is theirs, people live an insular lifestyle which undermines the importance of shared space and community. On top of this you are car dependent and will probably spend your weekends cleaning your fibreglass kingdom and buying garden gnomes. Besides this, I find that many suburbs have a creepy vibe to them, that living space is close enough that sunbaking with your boobs out in the backyard is problematic but segregated enough so that no one is around to hear you scream when your body is hacked into little pieces and disposed of in oil vats or that no one will notice your absence when your father locks you and your children who also happen to be your siblings in a basement dungeon for twelve or so years. Joseph Fritz, after all, didn’t live in Manhattan.

We go out one Friday night. The taxi to the venue costs $70. It is shock waves amazing. Bumping, grinding, bumping and grinding, body rubbing, incorporating clothing as props and explosive dance moves, the patrons are going off and my group of four stand around in gobsmacked awe.

Darren comes back from the bathroom regaling that some one has sprayed the walls with chunder and is lurching around the men’s toilet as if they are the living dead. Anna captures the eye of a man from the Congo who decides he wants to take her to Vegas, but not on a Sunday as he is busy with church. I get into a conversation with a man who tries to tell Anna that convicts weren’t sent over to Australia, but the mentally ill were, that’s why there is so much Schizophrenia Down Under which some how escalates into me slapping him in the face multiple times, and him enjoying it. I should have been deterred by his pleasure, but it feels good to slap someone hard in the face, especially if they are a fuckwit.

From there it’s another $70 ride home, where we test out the taste of raw eggplant because we are drunk and hyper and in living the suburban dream, there is little else for us to do.

In for the long haul.

zita_whalley — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 23:14:00 GMT

I arrive at LaGuardia at 6am and I haul my luggage onto the scales.

A middle-aged airport lady raises an eyebrow and looks at me through her painted face.

“You’re over. Excess baggage is $90.”

“Let me re-pack.” I sigh.

The airport lady looks me and the pack horse look I am sporting up and down.

“Where you going to put it honey?”

I don’t think five pounds is that overweight, even when that five pounds turns out to be more like ten. And I’ve never understood why airport ladies are like this. What’s in this policing for them?

I re-pack. On the airport floor, with a line of people building up behind me, I repack my bags after three months of travel. Shit is everywhere.

I haul my bags on the scales again.

“Still needs to lose another couple of pounds.”

I haul my bag off again.

Philadelphia airport. Boarding a plane to LA, from where I will catch a train to San Diego, to visit Anna, a close friend, who has relocated there temporarily while she works on a reality T.V show about car hoarding. Everyone on the full flight has boarded and is strapped in. We get greeted by the stewardess over the PA. Then the flight gets cancelled and we are told to go to the customer service desk, which is manned by one person, for rescheduling. The line extends across the length of the concourse.

I’m rerouted through Charlotte.
I don’t even know where that is.

I arrive to discover that my onwards flight is delayed, which, at this stage does not make me happy, but my need for the bathroom is overpowering my want to yell. I enter the toilets and the first thing I notice is that the withered old bathroom attendant is singing. She is singing loudly and proudly. Her song goes like this:

My beautiful ladies, god bless god bless, my beautiful ladies enjoy your flights.

She interrupts herself whenever anyone comes in and says:

Welcome, welcome, come on in to my bathroom, I love you.

Some people may find this appealing. I don’t. Furthermore, I was in need of doing a number two. The old woman makes her way up through her cubicles, cleaning them, loving them, singing to them, singing to us, to me, so I choose a cubicle far away, although inevitably, I know that she will be cleaning, loving, blessing and singing to the toilet bowl and the universe next to me as I try to snap one off. It’s a little disconcerting, but need triumphs over personal boundaries and for the first and hopefully last time, I have a strange woman singing a song for me, blessing me – one of her many beautiful women – while taking a dump.

Eventually, I come out of the cubicle and she wants to ask me about my travel plans, as she has already asked all of the other beautiful women who have washed their hands before me. Inevitably, upon hearing my Australian accent she quizzes me about Kangaroos – Have I ever seen one? Do they attack? How strong are they exactly? Would they chase her down the street? I start to talk about roadkill. I don’t know why I like to do this but I do it often with foreigners. I like to de-romanticise the Kangaroo and describe them in their natural habitat which is often dead on the side of the road, tyre marks through head. I know it makes me a bit of a wang, but why deny a simple pleasure? I tell her about how we hit them with our cars at dusk and dawn, how guys are employed to shoot them, how we eat them, and once how a friend’s particularly derro boyfriend drilled a hole through the head of a dead one at the age of seventeen. And then I tip her a dollar. That’s the going rate for an awkward bowel movement experience.

When I arrive at San Diego airport twenty two hours have passed since I first hauled my luggage to West 4^th Subway, only to learn that Oceanview, where my friend Anna is staying is not a suburb of San Diego, but the suburbs near San Diego and another hour or so on a shuttle. As I lug my luggage onto yet another mode of public transportation I stew. Oceanview better be fucking amazing, although based on Anna’s description (My hotel is on a freeway next to a Hooters!), I have a sneaking suspicion it’s not.

Really? I really need a car in LA?

zita_whalley — Sat, 2 Feb 2013 23:11:00 GMT

You really, really, really do need a car in L.A. You just do. I was surprised to learn that they even had a public transport system. So why I didn’t hire a car I don’t know. The subway is inadequate as it services only a small area, so for the most part, if you don’t have a car, you’re going to spend a lot of time on the buses. And waiting for those buses, because often they don’t come. How anyone can rely on them to take them to work is beyond me.

Not only this but everyone has a car in LA, everyone. Except for the mentally ill, the disadvantaged, the poor – who are often one and the same – and me, it seems. And there are a lot of mentally ill and disadvantaged and poor living LA, travelling on the buses. When not enclosed in a little bubble, there is far more grit and grime in this city then glamour.

The stench of the eternally damned, the unlucky and unblessed, fills the buses. Sometimes it’s in the form of overladen garbage bags filled with recyclable bottles and cans. Other times it’s in the form of shit stains on the seat of the pants of a one eyed man, his bare limbs shingled and pocked. Sometimes it’s in the arguments people have with themselves, sometimes it’s in the arguments that are shared. Sometimes it’s in the compulsive twitches of the man sitting across from you as he stands, and sits, and stands and sits, then stands, hangs off the hand railings, flexes, then sits and then attempts the foetal position. Sometimes it’s in the facts that you learn, that God is great and lives in Oklahoma, for instance. Some times it’s in the questions you are asked, like do you date the homeless, and in the salutations offered such as I want to suck your toes.

And then there are the between places, where the buses stop and the destinations haven’t begun and so the journey continues. Past rows of camped out homeless that find respite between garbage and hard places, past sex pests and unhinged belligerent people who scream insults at walls and sky. Past the elderly rummaging through trashcans and corpses – two, separate – stiff with rigamortis and alone. When these people talk to you – the alive ones – they converse in degrees of coherency, oscillating between the real world and some other place. If the American dream exists for these people, then it exists in that some other place. But listening to their agonised and muddied ramblings, I doubt it does.

But don’t get me wrong. If you’re not unfortunate, relegated to the bowels of existence, then Hollywood is the place to make dreams happen. It almost happened to me.

I am standing on Hollywood Boulevard, waiting for a bus to come, watching a dorky tweenage boy, flanked by burly black men in black and pursued by a handful of paparazzi, wave to passers-by. I’m not sure if he is famous or if it is part of some kind of tour you can buy, where for $70 you can get the celebrity experience. As I debate whether or not I would pay $70 for fifteen minutes of fame, a man named Jay approaches me. As it turns out he saw me while driving and had to park his car to say hello.

Flattered? No. Confused? Yes.

His bulbous guns bulge out of his muscle-T and Swarovski bling is studded into his ear lobes. He has lines razored into his shaved head. We are not like species.

“Why?” I ask.

“Well, I want to do a shoot with you. You got this real nice, natural, plain Jane look going on. I want to do a shoot.”

Plain Jane? Fuck you Jay. I am wearing make-up.

Sensing that perhaps I didn’t think much of his plain Jane call, Jay continues.

‘Yeah, you know, the girl next door. You’ve got these nice red lips and you’ve got a nice warm skin tone. I think you’ll look good in red.”

“What?”

“Yeah, you know, I see you’ve got no varnish on your toe-nails. We’ll just paint them red and put you in a heel. I want to do a shoot. I’ll pay you $500.”

I really didn’t understand what was going on, but as soon as anyone mentions my foot and a heel, I have a knee-jerk reaction.

“I have hoofs. You’re not going to have shoes that fit.”

“No, girl. I’m after someone with a big foot.”

“What?”

“You know. Big feet. What size are you?”

“ Ergh, an Australian 10.5. So that’s a 41 – 42.”

“Yeah girl. I’ve got some nice red heels we can put you in. I’ll pay you $500.”

“Umm, yeah right. Ok.”

“Look here’s my card. My name is Jay. Text or call me. I want to do a shoot with you.”

“…Ok.”

“Ok. Real nice to meet you, you know. Have a nice day.”

“…Ok… Bye bye.”

And then Jay leaves. Probably in a land rover with a white leather interior and personalised number plates that reads fornic8. I look at the card. Jay from Sexy Girl Video. The penny drops. So he wasn’t from Vanity Fair. His business card also states that he pays $500 – $1000. Not that I needed a clincher, but plain Jane at the lowest rate seals the deal. No. I will not be calling Jay from Sexy Girl Video. Despite running low on funds, I’m not into jobs that increase the risk of infection of everything and bruise my ego.

I file the card away in my purse and wait for the bus. Eventually it comes. I board and take a seat across from a balding morbidly obese man with a guitar case and a clocked off human statue, head to toe in silver. The morbidly obese man stares at me for a while, imploring me to make eye contact with him. Eventually, I do.

“Why do you have such long assed legs?” he demands to know.

I sigh.

“Dude. I don’t bloody know.”

I plug my headphones in. I watch a woman get pissed off with a man who brought his cat on the bus.

In a week I’ll be gone, but this bus trip will always continue.

The selection and the process

zita_whalley — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 23:08:00 GMT

The most valuable skill to have to when working this particular set of puppets is the ability to talk yourself down from the brink of panic attack in a claustrophobic space while you’re sweating like a rapist, putting your body through a sustained stress; contorting it through awkward, impractical and physically incorrect positions and movement phrases while manoeuvring and animating twelve or so kilos while the audience members – kids and adults – push you, pull you, hang off you, yank you, belt you and clobber you, all while you are vision impaired and blinded by sunlight. This is what often many of these roves have come down to: the ability to endure.

The second most essential quality to have with these puppets is grace. Grace enough to hold your shit together as you come out of the puppet at the performance ‘s conclusion; when the minders tear open the velcro bindings and you birth forth like a sweaty mutant foetus breaking out of a steaming embryotic sack, covered in dirt and grime and broken bits of puppets, gasping for air as the crowd – the same fuckers who were punching and pulling and kicking you – clap and cheer as you take a bow. Then want to take a photo with you, they want to clutch on to your sweaty t-shirt, to document your boob sweat and matted wet hair forever, and to kiss you with thanks, as sweat dribbles down your face. I don’t have the Spanish to tell them that when they kiss my cheek in congratulations, it’s not just my sweat they’re kissing, but a mix of my sweat and the sweat of past performers who have operated the puppet before me.

These Body Part puppets are hard work. A giant nose, eye, mouth, ear, foot and hand. The material they are made out of is thick and unbreathable and as a puppeteer you operate the puppets from inside so you are fully enclosed. Your breath hole is your visibility hole, stale air is trapped and fresh air is scarce. The breadth of vision ranges from tunnel vision to not much, depending on time of day and shade. Three weeks of touring, three performances a day, five times a week. Fifteen shows a week, forty-five shows in the run. For these puppets, it’s a lot. They deteriorate with every rove, making it harder and more difficult to work with them and they begin to look like victims of abuse, amputation casualties that are rolling towards a bin. My back, already damaged from the eye at the start of the year worsens with each rove and soon my knee and then knees start to go. I find new bruises daily on my hips, arse and thighs, a rash in my armpits – from sweat or heat or somebody else’s fungal residue I don’t know - and a collection of sweat pimples in my cleavage and in the small of my back. I start taking painkillers, prescribed to me when I first put my back out and as I mask the old pains I create new pains, my numb body and good mood oblivious to my overexertion, until the meds wear off and I quickly spiral downwards into a grumbling bitter pile of soreness, ready to inflict my pain onto others. So I take more, and then life is good again, until they wear off and the cycle continues.

The central, urban gigs are the busiest and the most intense. In temperatures around 35’C swarms of people gather, waiting for the performances to start. The puppets come out and enter the plaza/square/street. The crowds go berserk. There is no concept of personal space let alone performance space, the audience crowd around holding onto and dangling off any part of puppet they can reach, thrusting their faces and small children at us, impeding our movement and view. I will never understand the adult thought process behind: A puppet. Kick it. Or the one behind:My child is terrified. Throw it at the puppet and then laugh hysterically about it.

As always we have minders, people whose main responsibility is to tell people to stop molesting the puppets but the audiences won’t listen. They get so close and so rammed as they try to batter us with their unhinged joy that it is impossible to do anything but stand still, sweat and plead in quiet desperation, “Fuck off you fuckers,” while trying to punch them away through the puppet’s skin until Toni stands right in front of your view hole and screams ”Five minutes left.” That’s the cue to start thrusting into and ramming people, taking them down or forcing them to get out of the way.

The lack of performance space gets so dire during these gigs that we get more minders, who at certain times, hold hands to form a chain, a barrier to keep the audience from mobbing us. It’s hard work for these minders; they are pushed and pulled as they try to stop overexcited people from coming too close. People throw confetti at us, people cheer us, people want our autographs and we are interviewed for multiple TV stations. At one gig we are shunted into a waiting van at the show’s end so the crowd doesn’t mob us – the closest I’ll ever get to feeling like a rock star no doubt. At one gig, one resourceful Chilean downloaded a company photograph from the web and turned it into a flag to sell at our gigs for the equivalent of $2.

I know it’s not fair to ball out a zealous crowd – it’s what you want. Besides, there are few things more disheartening than a shit crowd – such is the fragile state of a performer – especially when you’re dressed in a PVC fat suit, donning a chicken head as part of an instillation people blindly step over at the Melbourne Fringe Hub on their way to the bar. Or say, when you are dressed as a cow and you get cow tipped by three drunk country bogans dressed in womens underwear at a ute muster and start to bleed through your lycra cow leg and are unable to get up gracefully due to the awkwardness of the puppet’s structure, so you lie on your side for a while flailing about. So, yes, a zealous crowd is good. However it needs to be clear that these audiences are on another level, filled with madness and unbridled benevolent lunatics, almost frothing at the mouth at the sight – and they are a sight – of these giant dismembered body bits – real life animations that are both monstrous and human – moving towards them with lurching gaits and cheeky swaggers, agitators of the hysteria that is closing in around them.

Then there are the regional and district performances. The hospitality shown to us at these places – by everyone we are lucky enough to meet in Chile actually – extends beyond the usual warmth and generosity, and generally the crowds are fun and engaged without being maniacal. That aside, when we discuss performance plans the directions include: Stay away from the broken glass and mind the dog shit. At one of these gigs, an area where one of our minders saw a SWAT team as she was driving to it, we perform for three toothless winos who ask us for money. At another one of these gigs there is a clown roaming around. As we go to the performance site I watch this clown do his thing which includes directing traffic, trying to help out on a construction site and wandering around with the back of his clown costume undone so his arse hangs out. He kisses me at the end of the performance. He is missing teeth. We perform in a town called Lota, which translates to Town of Little Importance. Their main thing is that they have a defunct mine. These are the performances where stray dogs join in on the finales.

We’re in a proper ghetto in the north of the city and it’s filled with concrete, bars on windows, graffiti, rubbish, and dogs that look like they are in need of dying. Our driver is a local, proud of his neighbourhood and happy to meet us, as we are his friends from Australia. He is Juan. Or John. John Castle. Like Newcastle, but John Castle, and he is Number One. He decides to give us the John Castle tour, as long as we keep it secret.

The tour starts.

“This area is very dangerous. Drug dealers on every corner.”

The use of a drug made with the left overs from the process of making cocaine, similar to heroin, is high here.

“See? That’s a drug dealer there. She, she, is looking out for police.”

A skanky bent over crackwhore, scabs on her sallow face, stands on a street corner and glares at us as we drive by, slowly.

“And look, that man sleeps on the road. “

A homeless man sleeps on a mattress surrounded in litter on the footpath.

“Ohh and see him? No good. Addict.”

A lank man in double denim eyeballs our car, as we drive slowly, so slowly by.

We drive through a tricky intersection.

“See here? Many accident. No red, yellow, green, no. So cars come here and cars come there and boom!” John Castle makes an exploding noise with his mouth.

“See here?“

Along the cracked and dusty pavement the remnants of memorials to dead people cling onto a chipped and tired pole.

“Dead. Big accident. Many big accident.”

We drive to our dressing room, which is in the bowels of the local sports centre and wait for the gates to open, the car idling in front of them. A cute young Chilean girl, of about eleven, in a fluoro midriff t-shirt and short denim cut offs walks by the gates and swings the doors wide open with such force they close again. An old woman makes her way down to the gates from the sports centre and the girl yells out something to her. Nicolas, a member of our local crew laughs in shock.

“No. I can’t repeat that,” he says when we inquire, but we persist.

“Ok, she say something like, why don’t you open your own fucking gate you stupid fat bitch?”

Then he turns to us and says:

“There is no way I would come here alone, they would know you’re not from here.”

In spite of all of the skank, John Castle is proud. He drives us by his sister’s house – all we can see is a concrete fence and bars. He introduces us to his neighbour and shows us the house he grew up in. He drives us through tired streets with rundown houses and weathered people shuffling along the footpath. After showing us the sights and a highway he turns and asks:

“So, you like?”

The three of us in the backseat balk.

“…Ahh, yes? It’s great.“

John Castle smiles, satisfied that we have enjoyed his hood, and we have, I just wouldn’t want to live here.

Despite the difficulties of performing in hysteria, it’s no doubt an endearing shared quality of the people here, mostly. As always there are bogans and aresholes and children that you would like to punch in their soft spots, but largely the hysteria is an extension of excitement and warmth of a non-Anglo nature. It’s the same excitement and warmth that invites us back to bars and pubs for rounds of margaritas and empanadas, that hands you an icy cold bottle of water when you need it most and that fights the crowd after a performance to find your hand so they can clamp theirs on to it while they look you in the eye and tell you Gracias.

Hello. We have arrived.

zita_whalley — Sun, 6 Jan 2013 22:58:00 GMT

I arrive in Chile fucking tired. It’s the jetlag, the pressurised cabin, the lack of sustenance despite having eaten whatever it was that was put in front of me, but mainly it’s because I was trying to pack down my portion of a household the entire day and night prior to boarding in a cancerous heatwave. During one of the many Punt Road trips, and certainly not the final for the day, I notice one of those digital clocks attached to a building. It reads 7:05 and 43’C. I start to feel the rage, or rather, my rage rages further. I sweated out my sense of humour at 8:45 that morning as I squatted in a corrugated tin shed, the garage of a friend of a friend as I rummaged through said friend’s boxed up shit, collecting sweat in my cleavage and 23 kgs of belongings for her and her partner for me to take over to them, so by 7pm my rage with the day is in full swing.

It is a day of driving and sweating, to Richmond to Preston to Northcote to Fairfield twice over. It’s a long hot day, the final day of several that have been consumed with errands, goodbyes and packing. It finishes with a 2am op-shop dump run, leaving just enough time for me to shower, clean my now empty room, kind of organise my left over junk in the garage, not clean the bathroom or the kitchen, forget a bunch of stuff, take my washing off the line, finish packing for my overseas trip and to be collected by the taxi. So when I arrive in Chile I am exhausted from the move, foggy with time difference and confused by the bombardment of questions and utterances by our ‘attache’.

I’m travelling with a contingent – other performers I’m working with as part of a theatre festival in Chile. We are greeted by our ‘attache’, Ceasar. He’s young – eighteen – looks about twelve, is thin and affeminate. The extent of his ability to irritate is unknown to us as yet, but there are the initial signals. Skittish, flustered and slightly nervous he fires off questions and statements at us that we can’t answer or comment on as we arrive at the airport dazed and confused.

“Toni is the tour manager. You need to ask these questions to her. I don’t know, we don’t know. We just got off the plane, we are feeling a little tired.

“Yes, but it says you leave on the 28^th yes?”

“No.”

“No? It says here that it is.”

“Yes I know, but that is incorrect.”

“Ok. Doesn’t matter. So I’ve found a place for you to eat. Do you want to eat?”

“Can we go to the hotel first?”

“Yes of course. I can wait, Do you like sushi?”

“Right now I don’t know. “

“Ok. And who is Toni? “

“Toni is the girl you picked up earlier.”

“Ah, Yes I see. So on the 28^th you come back?”

“No.”

“This is very strange.”

“Can you please just speak to Toni?”

“Where is she?”

“At the hotel? Where you left her?”

“Oh yes yes. Don’t forget you must tip the driver.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know. One moment please”

He and the driver converse.

“He says it is up to you. And you must tip when eating at a restaurant.”

“How much?”

“Hmmm, not sure, up to you.”

The last time I was this tired and arriving into a new country was the year before, as I was moving out of another house and was mopping the floor minutes before the taxi took me to my 6am flight to New Zealand, where upon arrival, I promptly let the ATM machine eat my debit card and spent about $300 in calls to the Victorian Teachers Credit Union so I could tell them they were shit in a variety of ways. They are shit, bank with Bendigo. This time instead of loosing access to all my money, I go for a wander with Toni, the tour manager, in the afternoon. She is a boozehag in her own right, as am I, however together we occasionally become a super force of trashbaggery.

Whereas more whole people might have a conversation that goes like this:

“I keep on getting waves of dizziness.”

“I’m so tired I don’t think I can walk any further.”

“Sorry, you need to repeat that, I vagued out.”

“Where are we?”

“Fuck it’s hot.”

“Do you feel tremors?”

“What?”

And think: It’s time for sleep. We however want to christen our arrival in Santiago with one drink, just one glass of wine to say: Hello, we have arrived.

We discover $4 margaritas, our one drink turns into several. In a drunken haze we move to find a new bar, find it, enter, drink some more and then – despite having no memory of this but having photographic evidence as proof – dance with a headless, armless mannequin and enjoy it. Then we try to get home. Here lies the problem: I don’t speak Spanish, Toni doesn’t speak Spanish, I don’t know where I am, Toni doesn’t know where she is, I don’t know where I’m going and neither does Toni because we are unexpectedly rotten drunk and have forgotten to take the hotel’s card with us.

If I was a taxi driver at one in the morning, I wouldn’t stop to pick up two drunken gringos who don’t know who or where they are or going either, but eventually some poor guy does. Armed with only a tourist map, the kind that shows all the APEX money exchanges and certain chain restaurants across the city, we tell the taxi driver to take us to a metro station we can’t pronounce – we figure we can find our way from there. We can’t, surprise surprise, and even if the taxi driver did drop us off at Tobablaba metro station – and neither Toni or I can say if he did or he didn’t – we hadn’t factored in the multiple station entrances on multiple streets.

Toni and I roam around the streets pointing at our maps with such vigour we both wake the next day to find that we have pointed holes right through the part of the map most important, trying to work out where we are and how to get home. We go around in circles, passing the same bars over and over again, growing increasingly ratty and tired. The third time we pass a particular bar, Toni suggests going in for another beer, I decline, Toni’s still keen but the waitresses are pretty eager for us to leave so we do.

We garble feebly at passers by,

“Toabalaba? Tambalamba? Tormbarlaga? Bobalaba? Forbalrb?… Ah that way? Si yes, yes, I understand. Je comprends. Yes yes, hey! It’s this way.”

We walk to the end of the street, realise we are still lost, ask directions again, and do it all over again, and again and again. Eventually some man approaches and asks:

“Donde gla gla?”

At this stage one of us thinks to take out our door key which has the hotel’s name written on it, but still no address. He walks us to the Radisson and shows the bellhop the door key, they converse, and he leads us to our hotel, which by this stage is around the corner. We find out the next morning from our concierge, that we stumbled in at 4:30am, drunk and raucous and lucky. Lucky that we found our hotel after leaving the bar five hours earlier, and even luckier that he was on night shift and sober, so he could stop the two men who were following us from entering the building. All of this information, embarrassingly so, was translated by a hotel guest passing by, who overheard the concierge and our lack of Spanish. Mortified, we thank him for his translation and thank the concierge for looking out for us, two overexcited idiots, intoxicated by new surroundings and cheap tequila.