Serendipity is defined as a divinely happy accident and I'd say that describes a lot of pivotal moments in my life. I've met some of my most important people more by accident than design, and what saved me in near-death was a minor wrong turn by two surf-lifesavers in a GT muscle car. That night as I sat bleeding to death in my bosses' Mazda, they had gotten lost and were using our empty cul de sac to turn around and head back to the main road. If they had been driving a smaller car they could have easily pulled a U-ey on the street and never had seen me, but as it was they spotted me jumping out the door and waving them down with a bloody wrist-rag while my boss was slumped over the steering wheel - out cold.
These guys were my guardian angels, in the perfect place at the perfect time to save my life, and as lifesavers for the Piha surf club they knew how to calm me down and stave off the shock as we peeled out down the motorway in the fastest, most bad-ass ambulance possible. Thank you Piha life-savers whoever you are! I guess when you're that good at what you do your work just comes to you.
As if in a dream, they swooped me over to the hospital, dropped me off, and seeing all the blood, the whole place sprang into motion. Nurses strapped me into a wobbly gurney and banged me down a series of long fluorescent corridors.. Thinking they'd knock me out from the pain - I was wrong - New Zealand has a state run health care system and they're always looking to save money. Injecting numbing agents directly into the wound and washing out the glass shards with a shower hose and brillo pads occupied the next couple of torturous hours. In between telling me to 'hush up', and 'don't be a baby', the nurses informed me that I was missing half of my wrist. My main arteries had been severed along with the Ulnar nerves and Carpal tendons that control the sensations and movements of the outside half of my right hand. Above all I was damn lucky to be alive, another couple of minutes sitting in the car and I would have bled out.
Reconstructive surgery to repair the pathways for nerve regrowth all the way up from my wrist was attempted and the whole mess was sealed up in a globby Z shaped scar extending from the top of my wrist halfway down my forearm. This has sometimes pegged me as a suicidal. To this day my right pinky sticks out weirdly and catches on stuff and that side of my hand is still numb. My parents dream for me to be a concert pianist was instantly over.
I'll never forget the look on my boss's face when he showed up sheepishly at the hospital the next day to apologize. This man who had intimidated me so much over the past few months looked small and scared in the sterile room light. No longer the big man barking orders, that day he cowered in the corner, looking at the floor and waiting for me to say something. Ironically, even though I had done something stupid and careless by getting myself hurt, I felt like the hero that had pulled it through with bravery, and as I assured him that everything was ok and accepted his apology for passing out, I realized how tenuous and prone to sabotage these positions of power truly are. Sure I was on top right now, but if I accepted his offer to come back to the shop I was sure he'd find a way to get back at me. No matter, I appreciated that it took real balls for him to admit that he fainted at the sight of blood.. but then to promise to rehire me despite my klutzy ways was a stunning display of chutzpa. Besides.. I had nowhere else to go, I needed a job if I was ever going to get back to The States, so I said yes.
The next three months I was laid up at the house on disability and I learned to do everything with my left hand. It was a rich time of the year with summer and the garden in full bloom and I enjoyed the time off but not the loneliness of being isolated up on the mountain. My teenage hormones were going crazy and maybe my left hand felt new and different, because I began finding dangerous places to masturbate while everyone was at work or somewhere else on the property. I've always been turned on by warm sunlight and it must be true that idle hands are the devil's workshop because my unemployed hands were hardly idle that whole summer. One day I thought that I had the house to myself and I walked into my parents old master bedroom to bask in the sunlight pouring through the picture window onto the waterbed below. The only problem was it was my brothers bedroom now and he walked in on me violating his space. I remember looking at him like, "what?", and carrying on like nothing had happened. The look of shock and confusion on his face was priceless as he stormed out. I didn't give a fuck. Sometimes you do the worst things to your family, because you can.
Towards the end of that year as my wrist was healing well and the time was nearing to get the cast off and go back to work, my sister-in-law Ali's family were about to get together in Auckland, the main city down the way. She mentioned that it was a pool party and that her sister Liz would be coming in from Sydney for the holidays - in the southern hemisphere the height of summer is during the holiday season, and Ali talked in envious tones about how good her sister looked in a swimsuit. Eavesdropping on her conversations I gathered that Liz was a bit of a troublemaker and that it might be a source of tension at the party due to her having dated a black man recently; despite her parents disapproval. I was instantly intrigued and vowed to somehow ingratiate myself into getting an invitation.
Soon the day arrived, and as I self-consciously pulled the dinner jacket sleeve down over my gray and musty wrist bandage, I squared my shoulders in the mirror and vowed to make it an adventure. Little did I know…
At the first glimpse I caught of Liz out by the pool I was dumbstruck. I felt a catch in my heart like a hook was lodging in my chest. Her looks were beyond stunning, like someone out of the pages I had been jerking off to - but classier, and for real - moving about gracefully happy within herself. I'd never seen anyone with such poise, and with such a suntan!
At 24 I was sure she was way out of my league, but still I could look.. Her hips and breasts were shapely and inviting, like a beautiful stringed instrument just waiting to be strummed.. So supple and athletic was her body that it it took me a long moment to look up and admire the sensitivity of her face. It seemed that a thousand expressions hid behind her faint and mysterious smile. In an instant I saw her boredom with her situation and her struggle to conceal it. Her pride and her vanity in her feelings of superiority over her loved ones, and her embarrassment at being aroused in front of them. I summoned her whole story from looking in her eyes. She loved her family but she loved herself and her freedom more, and she was looking for a way out without breaking their hearts. More on my mind was that she was looking for a way to rebel.
All of this was enjoyed from an observer status as I watched her interactions over dinner. Her sisters jealousies and her parents ire were gently inflamed with offhand remarks about exciting and scandalous evenings on the town with her famous theater buddies, and in between she would look at me with a devilish and flirty glint in her eye as if I was in on the game.
I slowly realized that she was including me in her club, that she was silently communicating that she knew I was a black sheep too! We were artists - and comrades in arms - oppressed by the norms and expectations of our parents and older siblings.
I was smitten that night and I would have poured my heart out to Liz given the chance, but something about the way she held herself and the subtlety of our flirtation gave me the most powerful poker face. I dared not show any interest at the table yet the attraction was overwhelming between us.
It was a succulent and forbidden moment of excruciating fantasy and restraint; I had no real proof that she could feel the electricity in the room, but I had a feeling.. and it tasted like a 9 volt battery on the tip of my tongue.
Years later she sent me what she wrote in her diary that night~
"He glides into the garden cutting a schism of silence through the frantic family chitchat. (here a line is crossed out … in borrowed leather pants?) Tall, pale and awkwardly graceful he accepts a glass of something from Ma who is herself loosening up in the spirit of Festive indulgence. He crouches by the side of the pool. I sneak a look through a screen of wet lashes, swirling my toes in the water aware of my body, solid, tanned matter emanating a sudden and sharp rise in energy. I am lifted out of the stifling lethargy that always grips me when I go home, as though I revert to being twelve years old again and the soporific routine that revolves around preparing and clearing meals and interminable small talk wearies me and I am plotting my escape to a life of adventure … the real, adult me has been left behind in Sydney.
It’s warmer than usual for Auckland, slightly humid. His arrival is like a cool, milky evening breeze. The stuffy gathering takes on a charged atmosphere, but everyone else seems oblivious and only I notice that something beautiful came into the space like a swan gliding past on a glassy river. The others start to sound like insects, faintly buzzing in the background as if the volume has been turned down. Ma is still fussing, the ever-attentive hostess organising more drinks and passing nuts and chips. Alison placidly pregnant and helpful, always the good daughter, assists her… Fiona locked in some inexpressible misery (that I can guess at) craving attention… My father, frowning at a world full of disappointment, frustration always percolating just below the surface. I am deaf to them and mute.
My mind rattles, churns and analyses. He looks like a clean-cut, all-American boy with a handsome face and skin like a baby, deep intelligent eyes and a shy, withdrawn, sad quality …like … Holden Caulfield! He is a Catcher in the Rye! If he were an actor I would cast him in the role, perfect! … Not that Salinger would ever sell the film rights to Hollywood!
I look. I look away. I don’t want to get caught. He looks like an observer. Will he recognise another? I blush as though he … anyone could read my mind. I move to the spa pool absorbing the sensual tingling of warm bubbles. I feel detached, pleasantly inebriated, unsettled, stimulated, conscious of an inescapable, nonverbal communication. Though the voice of doubt makes fun of me, who knows what is going through his mind?
The evening passes crackling in an exhilarated limbo. I can barely make eye contact. I feel exposed as if my hormones are ricocheting round the room with a life of their own and on some level everyone can feel them. Ma and Pa would definitely find them inappropriate, unseemly!
Ma draws attention to his cut wrist, which I think is tactless, but she is probably innocent of malice. He answers her questions with a deliberate politeness, a completely charming (to me) seriousness. I wonder if he really is very straight? Maybe he is an obnoxious, preppy college kid (he’s young, younger than me)? … No … I wonder if he is a virgin? I dismiss such thoughts as unworthy of me, though another part of me is laughing at such spontaneous lust. I am surprised that something can just hit you like that, with such clarity. The last time I remember that happening was with John. I am surprised that it seems beyond any semblance of control or decision. Suddenly this visit back home doesn’t seem quite so onerous!"
~ It's amazing to me that a fumbling 17 year old trying to conceal his hard-on could inspire such prose - but I'll take it - and looking back I think it may have been purely chemical. Liz inspired in me a new level of sexual excitement, one that I had to be cool as a cucumber to maintain, or I'd have come right there in my pants. Perhaps she mistook my silent terror for calm confidence, but at any rate we were entangled together in bed within days.
Liz taught me to how slow down with a woman, and she walked me lovingly through the first thrilling lessons of slowly rising pleasure, showing me where, when, and how much to grow our quivering, dancing excitement. The first time we came at the same time was at the apex of a long spiral column of light that we had climbed up to for what seemed like hours. It was heaven. Like being bathed in a warmth so healing and sacred that your whole being is cradled in joy and fulfillment. It was True connection.. both of us feeling the same thing at the same time and riding a mutual rhythm through peaks and valleys of indescribable ecstasy.
For me, re-attaining, and holding onto that feeling became an obsession and it's what sometimes killed the mojo of our sex. I would always ask afterward if she had come, and just saying it put me right back into amateur hour status. Still, she was a patient tutor and would coax my tender hermit crab ego back out of it's shell and then ride me like a dirty carnival tilt-a-whirl.
One day when I was just back at work a couple of weeks, Liz told me that she was headed back to Sydney and we had to see each other one more time. I called in sick and we met that dewy morning, in a hidden glen on my family's property. Ringed by giant Kaori trees slowly nodding their approval we expressed our love like never before - wantonly.. upright.. and then on all fours - rolling around through beds of wet grass and pinning each other down in the hot sun. Dripping with sweat, our young bodies slid all over one another, and we cried out so loud you could have heard us in your car coming up the driveway.
When we were finished and panting I turned around to see my boss standing at the entrance to the glen, staring at us. I don't really know how long he had been there, but I heard he had a busy day at work and he needed my help, and perhaps my brother had snitched on me being home. But what made it worse was that he had asked Liz out a couple of times before and been rejected. And here was his punk apprentice on top of her, when he's supposed to be at work underneath one of his cars.
I guess shock, disappointment, and surprise, doesn't really describe what I put my boss through in that moment, it was more like he was broken. From that day on I could feel the pendulum of power swing my way even farther; I knew he would never fire me for a story that he couldn't live down with his mates. Around the shop we never mentioned Liz again, but in the back of my gut I could sense that payback was going to be a bitch…
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