Apocalypse Now

*

With its curious division of upper class and working class, its ethnic mix of Irish and Italian, and its coterie of some of the wealthiest families in the United States, Manhasset was forever struggling to define itself. It was a town where dirty-faced urchins gathered at Memorial Field—to play “bicycle polo;” where neighbors hid from one another behind their perfect hedgerows—yet still kept careful track of one another's stories and foibles; where everyone departed at sunrise on the trains to Manhattan—but no one ever really left for good, except in a pine box. Though Manhasset felt like a small farm community, and though real estate brokers tended to call it a bedroom community, we cleaved to the notion that we were a barroom community. Bars gave us identity and points of intersection. The Little League, softball league, bowling league, and Junior League not only held their meetings at Steve's bar, they often met on the same night.

Brass Pony, Gay Dome, Lamplight, Kilmeade's, Joan and Ed's, Popping Cork, 1680 House, Jaunting Car, The Scratch—the names of Manhasset's bars were more familiar to us than the names of its main streets and founding families. The life spans of bars were like dynasties: We measured time by them, and found some primal comfort in the knowledge that whenever one closed, the curtain would rise on another. My grandmother told me that Manhasset was one of those places where an old wives' tale was accepted as fact—namely, that drinking at home was the mark of an alcoholic. So long as you drank publicly, not secretly, you weren't a drunk. Thus, bars. Lots and lots of bars.

J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar.

The rhythmic sound of the drums and the crackling heat of the funeral pyre were more than enough to awaken that sleeping parasite, his soul. He had travelled so far from the frozen villages of his birth; to be here in ancient Mexico on the pyramid of the sun, waiting for the end, a terrified slave. The same place he would stand a thousand years later as a young school boy, terrified of change, of emerging adolescence. He had topped just about everything in Primary School, but the prize of dux went to a girl who's parents were always at the school helping. Unlike his, who had never stepped foot in the place after enrolling him. How could you beat six As? Well Dianne Smith did; and he was cheated of the prize. Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered when you had the whole of life in front of you, and the 52 Great Books on the shelf. It was his aim to understand everything. Not to waste bis life in frozen moments, caught in destructive habits.

That was why it was so important to break up. Lisa, who he had seen shortly before his latest recovery, who had driven over because misery loves company, was astounded by his new found health and sobriety, and peppered him with questions about how he did it. Everything was symptomatic. My dad's in AA, she let drop, and he urged her to speak to him. How delighted the old bastard would be, her daughter coming home to the fellowship. These were life gifts and mortal gifts, and if one more idiot blabbered on about their higher power he'd machine gun them. It was patently absurd to suggest that just because someone had suffered an addiction problem they should be compelled to a particular spiritual philosophy. The twelve steps are not the ten commandments, if I'd wanted to go to church I would have done so, was bound to get him unloved and uncalled, if not kicked out.

All his life he had been surrounded by fanaticism of one kind or the other. We truly believed in those great dance floors, in the mirror balls, in 3am and the heaving mass, 4am and the urgent search, 5am despair, 6am the sunrise and the thoughts running like silver tadpoles in the field of vision. He was satisfied no harm had been done. How wrong he was. But it was the cruel dark edges of a grateful time, the overwhelming discovery that he was not in fact a crippled, deformed, alcoholic dwarf loping into view, poisoning everything and everyone around him with his toxic attitudes. He thought about joining the government payroll, but hesitated. Please please mister, I know I've done wrong. He wanted to tell the story of the time when they all died, when a giant tsunami washed back from the beach and the end time, predicted for 1972, really came.

That was why he had found such pleasure in the bottom of a glass, when the world was going to end there wasn't much point in suffering, you may as well enjoy every last moment, go to the maker drunk. He made sure he stacked enough partying into those years that he would never regret not having given it a good nudge. A framed copy of the front page photography in the Daily Telegraph of the woman who had been caught driving six times over the alcohol limit, defiantly sticking her tongue out to the camera, hung on the wall where he worked. He never expected to meet her; but had stared at the picture when he first noticed it, wondering what the story was behind it. At least the kid hadn't been hurt. Nothing could be worse than the drunken truck driver who killed two kids. How could you live with that? The honourable thing old chap, the heels licking tightly together.

As an oblivion seeker it was escape from the bondage of self he sought the most. He didn't like the way he felt, demoralised, criminalised, beaten down, distressed from the beatings and jumping here and there in his head, unable to bear the pain, unable to find shelter. The silences didn't keep the beatings at bay, it only made them worse. But at least by refusing to speak he could say: this is not fair, this is not right, this is not justice, and you're a pack of brutal bloody bastards bashing up on a defenseless kid because you psychos you can. And they were his parents. How could you? When he had children of his own the question resounded even more: how could you? Do that to a child? Even at school, in the freezing mornings, he was forced to stick his hand out for the cane. And the pain never stopped. Hence the retreat into silence, into some comfy world. He would never be found. Even now there was a lot of distance between them; and he went about his day wrapped in the disguise of the ordinary man. Good on you love, he said as he shook her hand after the meeting, her little two year old who had played quietly in the corner all meeting now on her hip. It's fantastic you're here, good on you.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25751271-2702,00.html

FORMER newspaper editor and columnist Frank Devine has been farewelled today by a who's who of Australia's media and political circles.
A former editor of The Australian, The Chicago Sun-Times and the New York Post, Devine was remembered as a larger-than-life character who brought a worldliness and sophistication to the national broadsheet.

Around 250 mourners attended the requiem mass, held this morning at St Leonard's Catholic Church in Sydney's north, including former NSW Premier Nick Greiner, current NSW Opposition leader Barry O'Farrell, federal Liberal frontbencher Tony Abbott and a plethora of conservative columnists and newspaper identities.

Among them were News Limited chairman John Hartigan, The Australian's current editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, and historian Keith Windschuttle.

The eulogy was delivered by his close friend and journalist Jane Fraser, who lunched with Devine weekly for the best part of 20 years.

“He was a person who enhanced lives; quick to praise and encourage, slow to criticise, and he had more good and true friends than you can imagine,” Fraser told mourners.

Devine died on Friday, aged 77, after a long battle with illness.

He is survived by his wife, Jacqueline, and his daughters Miranda, Alexandra and Rosalind.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25761426-7583,00.html

David Banks

IT is tea on the first day of the first Test in Wales; England is three wickets down and struggling and I, against my upbringing and instincts, am barracking for the Aussies on behalf of a friend who cannot be with us.

Half a day earlier, on the other side of the planet in St Leonard's Catholic Church, Naremburn, in northern Sydney, family and friends who loved him as I did bade farewell to my former boss, friend and mentor.

Frank Devine, "the laughing cavalier of Australian journalism", died last week the way he edited great newspapers: with courage, with dignity and humour and with a stubborn disregard for the deadline his maker had set.

Only his timing, usually so immaculate, could be faulted on this occasion. "I think I have one more Ashes series in me," he had predicted cheerfully but mistakenly from his hospital bed three weeks earlier.

The great man had known for a long time that the game was up, accepting his fate with a graceful nonchalance for which a lifetime of devotion to Catholicism had prepared the world's unlikeliest altar boy.

"I have unstoppable cancer," he growled at me down the phone from his home in Cammeray. "I suppose you've heard?"

Indeed, I had. An email from Chris Mitchell, editor-in-chief of The Australian and an old colleague from my years in Australia, alerted me to the state of Frank's worsening health just a day after the two had lunched together. "I'll find a flight," I promised Frank. By the time I arrived at his bedside in the Royal North Shore Hospital, he was battling double pneumonia. Not that the irascible old legend was letting that hold him back.

Long-suffering Jacqueline, the love of his life and his wife of 50 years, arrived moments before me bearing a dozen Sydney rock oysters which he slurped with selfish satisfaction while dictating a text message to his eldest daughter, Miranda, requesting pate and baguette for his evening meal.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25751267-2702,00.html

THE first time I had lunch with Frank Devine was in 1988, after we'd had a few personality issues; it was not unknown for Frank to inflict hiccups on those who didn't measure up to what he expected.

He took me to an Italian restaurant as was his wont. It was a popular place, full, on this particular day of Eastern suburban glitterati; Frank loved a good entrance; he pushed the door open, paused and then bellowed at the maitre-d; HELLO I’M DEVINE! There was the thunderous sound of knives and forks hitting glass table tops, as the diners, mouths open, wondered whether they were witnessing the Second Coming. And so began the best 20 years of my life; a weekly lunch with Frank, Paddy McGuinness and James Murray. These lunches were interspersed with many more erudite guests, including priests - some of them troublesome - politicians and accomplished journalists passing through town. We went at first to the Shakespeare, a rather ordinary pub up the road from the office. It was aptly named; the food, for example, was half comedy and half tragedy. After a while Paddy, a food snob if ever there was one, cocked his snook at what he thought inferior cuisine, and took himself to the more up-market restaurant across the road; he would glare at us balefully, wave his superior piece of fish in the air and then join us for a restorative ale or two, over which he would tell us why we were misguided souls who knew from nothing.

Frank would retaliate by talking about his grandchildren, which, to Paddy, was a forbidden subject, as was any mention of sport, especially cricket, one of the many loves of Frank’s life. What a contrast they presented; if they’d advertised for someone in every way different from themselves, they would have found each other; they were the greatest of friends; who would ever forget Frank crying when he delivered the eulogy at Paddy’s funeral.

James Murray has averred that although he had many differences with Frank, they had never had an argument; however I well remember the time he left the table in a monumental huff at something Frank had said or done, and for good measure, when he walked down the side of the pub, he stopped at the window, wacked his walking stick on the windowsill, gave us a considerable piece of his mind and marched – well, okay, hobbled, down the hill.

Everyone has a Frank story, and when he died almost every obituary mentioned his love of a long lunch. Yes, he did, but not in the sense that journalists had the reputation of whiling away the afternoons getting plastered. He was too sophisticated, too innately courteous, perhaps too nervous of getting a tongue-lashing from Jacqui; also there were his grandchildren to pick up from school, take them to his place, talk to them about sport, teach them to play poker and show them how to cook. He got as much pleasure out of them, as he did his intellectual friends; and he loved little anecdotes such as when he asked one of Rozzie’s twins how his younger brother, Robert, was. In deference to the boy’s trouble with the R word, Frank said: “How’s Wobert? Frank replied the boy, it’s not Wobert; it’s Yobert!

Shellharbour, NSW, Australia.