Books in Braille

Books in Braille
I was stuck on a couch in a bar frequented by students and young people alike. Surrounded by my friends (on all sides), entrapped and in the throes of having a ‘good time’, I sat there, thoughts dulled by the sounds of loud music, loud conversation. Loud shirts worn by loud people were spitting at me, their buttons on their shirts like mouths that couldn’t stop. They were telling me about how they were sick to death of being told what they are/are not allowed to do. They said these things with smiles as if they were poetic and capable of changing an existence they despised. “The government... The government,” one of the loud shirts with blue buttons stuttered at me, “needs to change the current welfare system so that they can blah blah blah blah” he or she continued as he or she sipped an eight dollar coopers pale ale. Of course, the conversation didn’t go exactly like that: these were the brightest minds in Melbourne, they knew the facts!
I looked around for a companion; the roof could not escape the loud music either. It visibly shook and vibrated as if it was in the midst of a fit, its cool pattern swaying back and forth like a conversation. Attached to it were phallic shaped light shades that sprayed various amounts of light on the varying textures of the roof; such imagery made me very uncomfortable. My examination of the vertical boundary of the club was interrupted. “What do you think?” someone said. I did not respond, “Jack, what do you think?” “I think I’m in the throes of having a good time,” I threw out amongst the shirts. This was followed by a few laughs that were perfectly in time with the music. “No, what do you think about the government?” “The government?” I froze. He (I was sure it was a ‘he’) began to give me a rundown of the conversation I had been deliberately avoiding, like the synopsis of a second rate movie. I was missing out on valuable not-listening-to-this time so what choice did I have: honesty. “I don’t care,” I said. This was followed by an earthquake, a tsunami, a storm, heavy rain, every cliché that writers use to illustrate tension and conflict. But really, it was followed by a bunch of loud shirts with loud haircuts, who were previously talking very loud but had now gone completely silent, turn around to watch me fumble and explain myself.
I looked down and I was naked, surrounded (entrapped) by my friends, taking a short hiatus from having a good time to discuss politics at a trendy bar frequented by university students and young people alike. I was now in the throes of a panic attack. The penis lamps on the roof threatened to penetrate us like frozen icicles. What a sight: The bright young minds of Melbourne’s southeastern suburbs found dead, penetrated by metaphorical ice blocks. The combined eulogy could read ‘They wore their hearts on their sleeves’. In other news, you can by the hearts of Melbourne’s youth at General Pants Co. for about eighty dollars. This sturdy investment promises to provide you with political insight, creative ability; but remember to machine wash on cold.
There was no escaping the dissection of my political leanings. Apparently, what I had construed as ‘wanna have some beers at such and such bar with such and such’ should have read ‘wanna be interrogated by a guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt about the legitimacy of the Gillard Government’. “Luke, we need to know why you don’t care, we think you do care and we collectively need you to explain your position.” I opened my mouth and began to talk but I was stopped. “However, make sure that you don’t plagiarise or use any personal pronouns.” I ignored every word he said. This guy was far too young to be a retired gent from Queensland or Miami so why was he wearing that shirt?
I became suspicious. And like all good cowards when cornered on all sides, with no means of escape, and the roof threatening to cave in on you, I got on the attack; I ‘Bear-Gryllsed’ it. “I am all for the expensive coopers pale ale driven political change”, I smiled, “but I’m really drunk so I don’t care, you could say I have gotten too much into the cause!” This was met with silence. The shirts remained loud, the bar remained loud, but I had said something that I was not allowed to say aloud: ‘apathy’. I thought it was clever.
Word got around that we were leaving the bar because it was closing soon. Like a congregation, we gathered and marched down Chapel Street toward the twenty-four hour bottle shop. My earlier transgressions had been forgiven or forgotten and everyone was in high spirits. I started to walk to their beat, for no other reason than to keep up. We crossed alley after alley, walking, talking, chit chatting, moving at a pace. We all had our hands in our pockets and our mouths on auto. Their loud shirts weren’t so loud outside the club. People would recant stories as they walked past, we would hear tiny titbits, the sort of stuff you read in the MX newspaper. We could hear the sound of the trains going out toward Sandringham and others coming back. What practical things trains are, they take you one place and you have no choice in the matter: straight lines. It’s so simply. Cabs rolled past with their windows wound up and their security screens in place. Chapel Street takes on a yellow character at a certain time in the night. The streetlights and the glow of neglected shop lights dimly lit our red carpet. I felt in time and the street felt like a song: 4/4 time.
Prancing down the street, indian file, we swirled and rolled. A break in the rhythm: one of the guys was taking a piss in the alleyway so the rest of us waited around. I stopped and rested on a phone booth while he did what we all must do. I had time so I examined the booth, an outdated mode of communication no doubt; used only by vagrants and alcoholic single mums. It’s walls were metallic and looked like wire fencing but more rigid, as if to say “you are here to do one thing no dillidadling, no escaping!” Inside the booth was the phone itself, constipated with 50-cent coins, wearing the germs of Melbourne from 1970 to 1999. It will sit there forever. The phone booth is sacred. I was finishing up my examination (Credit at best) when the wall of it caught my eye. An ad with a forty something year old man, unclean, sad looking. The caption said something like ‘depression is not stress: it doesn’t go away.’ I said aloud “obviously, one of us has the target demographic wrong.” Three or four of the gang turned and acknowledged what I said but did not respond. Everyone was done, flies and buttons done up. We moved on. Down the road, not even one hundred metres sat another phone booth. Inside it the same damn sad man! Eyes watery, i was not fooled. I do not for one-second think that a photographer ran around looking for participants who were truly depressed; the man was an actor, acting sad. But no wool, ah! No wool was pulled over my eyes. I am a genius.
We finally made it to the bottle shop. A bouncer stood proudly outside, the gatekeeper, hand that feeds ya type of attitude. Our IDs checked out all good. Inside we went. Bright lights kill any party and this was no exception. I was sober to my lack of sobriety but the gatekeeper didn’t seem to mind. I was no longer thirsty and I was broke so I waited at the counter. A couple of the people I was with and had been all night (best friends) came up to the counter and ordered smokes. I watched as the store clerk turned to a completely neutral cabinet and fiddled amongst the various shelves looking for the right brand. He found it. Bright blue Horizons; no doubt a lot of research had gone into that colour selection. Nothing is by accident in this world. On the packet, I saw as my friend said “thanks” and the clerk said “thanks” back, was a picture of a sick looking man wearing a facemask. The beautiful bright blue packet read ‘SMOKING KILLS’ in block letters. Hundreds of
other beautiful looking packets sat in that blank cabinet, like the authorities were trying to make smoking an exclusive nightclub hidden away. Don’t they know that smoking isn’t stress? After several more transactions that were mutually beneficial, we thanked the gatekeeper for his incompetence with a nod and headed to the house.
The house was on Dandenong road about a five-minute walk from Chapel Street. The front door was white and the entrance hallway had mustard yellow walls housing pictures of serene meadows. How delightful. The hallway was lined with Braille books. Box upon box, every book ever written collected and stored in their hallway. Beyond the mustard yellow confines of the entrance, music was playing in the light of the lounge room. People were visible. Things were happening. Loud things. Fun things. The lounge room was skirted with bicycles below a psychedelic picture of Bob Dylan wearing glasses. People were talking and communicating amongst the furniture, amongst the floorboards. Their voices were as smooth as carpet and tiled with polite conversation. They greeted me kindly, asked my name, and complimented my shirt. Charley, the guy who owned the place, was doing straight lines in the bathroom between the shower and the sink, topless. He was dancing. There was an esky in the corner and I had changed my mind about being too drunk, so I helped myself.
I sat down with my beer. “People watching, are we?” said a beret as she sat next to me on the couch. “I suppose, yeah” I replied. “How do you know Charley?” “I don’t, I know his friends”, I said, sipping my beer. This conversation went on and on. I mentioned the Braille books and the mustard yellow walls. Charley came over, still dancing, and Mary (the beret lady) said that I had noticed the Braille books. “We collect them, they are so hard to find,” Charley said. “Can you read Braille?” I asked. “No” he laughed as one of the guests patted him on the back as they passed. “What use do they serve?”A legitimate question I thought. He laughed once more: “probably none, but they are interesting” he said with a smile as he walked off to fraternize with his other guests. Mary and I kept talking. She started getting too close to an episode of Q and A with a lot more Q than A. I think Mary and the Hawaiian shirt guy might have been in cahoots, one of them was Tony Jones in disguise; they both had the right build. Once again, there was no pulling the wool over my eyes! I always saw things exactly the way they were. To get this spy away from me I made my head do a lap of the room so that my boredom (suspicion) was obvious. The roof: white; floors: wooden and scratched from excessive moving of furniture and things; the walls: various colours covered with various artworks of varying media all combining to create the unified feeling that something was going on. I pondered this in all its obscurity and ridicule. Firstly, who would go to someone’s house to read a book? Secondly, what are the odds that they are blind? Blind readers are less common than the dying breed of vision-able readers. The Braille books were lost on me, and thankfully so was Mary/Tony Jones.
About an hour later Charley and I started talking again. I must admit that I was intrigued by how he could smile while he has perfectly usable real estate being taken up by perfectly unusable things. He introduced me to this guy David. He was a tall handsome fellow whose head never stopped moving to a rhythm. His foot tapping, he told me all about his university degree. He practically eluded me to the fact that he was going to change the world. I said “something’s never change” and his foot
kept tapping to his own rhythm. He was not fazed by my pessimism; perhaps one of the Braille boxes was dedicated to self-help and empowerment. David, Charley and I shared many similar interests; we liked the same music and we spat for some time about bands like the Clash and Arcade Fire. Charley leant in to me like Robin Williams in the Dead Poets Society, very teacher like, and said “don’t you see what they are saying?” I did see what they were saying. I could no longer let Hawaaiin shirt, Mary or Charley corner the market on grilling people; I channelled my melodramatic side: “Yeah, but there will always be roads and buildings and rules and regulations, time constraints, divorce…” I proceeded to label everything that I saw wrong with everything that I could think of. I was definitely cracking the tiles of polite conversation but he brought the chisel. To my surprise neither Charley nor David were disturbed by that. David put his arm around Charley, laughed, kissed him on the cheek and said, “I’m getting another drink do you want one?” I’ve watched Q and A many times and I know that Tony Jones’s producer would have been in his ear about letting such a grandiose statement go by! Perhaps Charley and David were not like the others.
I decided to remain on the couch. Alone, tapping my foot to the beat, I watched as things started happening like they did on Chapel Street. People swaying, flirting, smiling and enjoying themselves. David and Charley were arm in arm, David’s foot still tapping. They started to dance right in front of the entrance to the hallway. The Braille books within striking distance, mocking them but they didn’t care. David smiled and kissed Charley again. Charley smiled back and they kept dancing. Occasionally, someone would tap them on the back, say goodbye and walk out. They kept dancing. I could not help but smile at the superfluity of it all; dancing while surrounded by bicycles and books for the blind, they were captivating!
It was late by the time Charley came back over to me. Smiling, he said, “Hey man, you are welcome to stay. We have a spare mattress”. I looked passed him to David, who was tap tap tapping away. “That would be awesome, thanks heaps,” I said. I was broke so a cab was not a feasible option anyway. Charley showed me to the spare room. Five star, with a beautiful view of the train line. As I nestled myself into the mattress I heard the sounds of late night freight trains taking things this way and that way. Charley singing a lullaby in the next room interrupted the sounds of the trains. “Blue Moon” I heard him sing while David was in the bathroom brushing his teeth. I drifted off.
I woke up to the sounds of the early morning trains. A feeling that my brain was bleeding all over the mattress occupied my mind. At the very least someone was hitting me with a sledgehammer. I left the room in search of water and maybe some Panadol. I saw Charley and David outside on the balcony. Shirtless and in love, they sat wearing a blanket around their legs facing the highway and the sunrise. Beyond the highway with its billboards warning us to slow down at the risk of death, beyond the train lines running in straight lines to Pakenham and back again, to Pakenham and back again, to Pakenham and back again, the sun sat as it does every morning. Charley and David were side-by-side sharing a cigarette. However, this morning, standing alone in the entrance to the hallway, wearing a blanket of led over my head that throbbed with every step or thought, I saw two people who didn’t see any of that. They didn’t see the trains, they didn’t see the highway, the billboards or even the sun. They saw past it all, David’s foot still tapping.