Eulogy

*

"The world begins at the kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live...

"Perhaps the world will end at the kiitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite."

Joy Harjo.

I first met Colin in the late 1960s, when he probably wasn't much
older than 16. He used to hang around a squat at the back of Victoria
Street behind the Cross. Now there are multi-million dollar apartments
overlooking the city, but then it was a squat with that cane matting
on the floor that always smelt of bong water. I always remember him
sitting up in bed with his then boyfriend Phillip looking as pleased
as punch. They were volatile, always arguing and getting back
together, always fabulously out of it.

Of course there were a string of boyfriends ever after, Howard, Tom,
Alastair, others. Almost all of them are gone now.

None of the gang I mixed with back in the late 60s would think of
having sex with a man except for money, but Colin was gay before it
became the norm to be gay in inner Sydney, a person who cared not a
jot for the normal social manners. Without calling him a pioneer slut,
you could say he was a pioneer of a more liberated lifestyle; he
wouldn't tolerate for a moment the conservatives who seemed so hell
bent against him and his friends.

Later, in our twenties, Colin was a part of a whole gang of wild party
animals who used to hang around Paddington and the inner-city. We had
a house next to the Hargrave Hotel, where we were well known, every
spke on the iron grates painted multiple colours; ahlah the 70s. Most
of them are dead now, Ian Farr, Lyn Hapgood, John Bygate. Colin, the
so-called Duracell bunny of AIDS, was one of the longest survivors.

They were all hyper talented hyper dysfunctional, that gang, to me
they seemed to be the centre of everything. Colin was part of all
that, part of everything that was. Standing in the street, shrieking,
daaahhhling. Or a quieter, how are you love?

He was always an hysterically funny man, finding humour in the
tragically predictable behaviour of others; full of gossip. Sometimes
he could be more akin to a drag queen out of drag than a normal
Australian male. But Colin was always kind at heart, perhaps more
understanding of others because of his own foibles and predilections.

A normal job never seemed to interest Colin very much. He continued
to live a relatively bohemian life, largely on the dole, for quite an
astonishing number of years. But if a traditional work ethic wasn't
exactly his strongest point, there were many other qualities which
always made him fun to catch up with.

Always friendly, he could always make a home seem a home; and was
never happier than pottering around, stoned of course, tidying up
someone else's house, sometimes my house. Making dinner; organising,
just pottering.

Like others, I was shocked by Colin's final days. It was very hard to
see someone who had been so dynamic and so full of life, and of course
so dysfunctional, in such a terrible state. It's a mercy he's no
longer suffering, but I'm really sad to see him gone. He was just such
fun. The final time I saw him, his short term memory was gone, he
couldn't remember the walk I had taken him on around the coast three
months ago; but he could remember that house in Paddington where we
all lived 30 years ago. And so we gossiped about the people back then,
as if they were still all alive, still all young. Perhaps that was
the best way to go, and the best way to remember him, lost in a bubble
of time, that funny, often shriekingly funny bloke you were always
happy to see, asking: how are ya love?

Colin Griffth
5/7/1952 - 25/1/2009.

Funeral held at James Murray Funeral Chapel
Broadmeadow
Newcastle Australia.
Friday 30 January 2009.

Peter died in a paper tiara
cut from a book of princess paper dolls;
he loved royalty, sashes

and jewels. I don’t know,
he said, when he woke in the hospice,
I was watching the Bette Davis film festival

on Channel 57 and then—
At the wake, the tension broke
when someone guessed

the casket closed because
he was in there in a big wig
and heels, and someone said,

You know he’s always late,
he probably isn’t here yet—
he’s still fixing his makeup.

And someone said he asked for it.
Asked for it—
when all he did was go down

into the salt tide
of wanting as much as he wanted,
giving himself over so drunk

or stoned it almost didn’t matter who,
though they were beautiful,
stampeding into him in the simple,

ravishing music of their hurry.
I think heaven is perfect stasis
poised over the realms of desire,

where dreaming and waking men lie
on the grass while wet horses
roam among them, huge fragments

of the music we die into
in the body’s paradise.
Sometimes we wake not knowing

how we came to lie here,
or who has crowned us with these temporary,
precious stones. And given

the world’s perfectly turned shoulders,
the deep hollows blued by longing,
given the irreplaceable silk

of horses rippling in orchards,
fruit thundering and chiming down,
given the ordinary marvels of form

and gravity, what could he do,
what could any of us ever do
but ask for it.

Mark Doty