Out on the highway to Sydney, with the sun shining on his freedom, he thought of the dream he’d had the night before. It was a repetitive dream he’d have again, he was carrying a small child that he hugged to his chest protectively, often whilst on the run, as if the whole world threatened and gave chase. This Child was extremely cute, sweet, adorable but vulnerable, and Arthur loved him dearly, he was the essence of his heart’s caring potential, and Arthur did his utmost to shield the child from harm. Clutching the Child securely in his arms, he would outwit the demons howling on their trail by speeding away on a bicycle, crashing down vertiginous slopes, flying and tumbling into the fabric of a harsh universe, the Child of his heart safe and smiling, as if enclosed in a sphere of diamond-hard light. This Child was all that was good about Arthur, innocent, guileless, fresh and bright, trusting and loving, not above seven years old, an age Arthur himself never grew emotionally beyond.
A semi-trailer loaded with new cars pulled up and a handsome, blond truck-driver smiled from the window and offered him a lift, all the way to Sydney. After much matey conversation the muscular dreamboat hinted that he wouldn’t mind sex with his long-haired hippie hitchhiker, they could do it in one of the new cars perched high on back but it seemed too outré to Arthur, he was chasing enlightenment and he felt this would cloud his resolution. He talked his way out of it by confabulating a young wife waiting for him in Queensland, which made the trucker more hot to trot and, in his fit of renunciation, Arthur worked hard to keep the spunk in his pants all the way into New South Wales.
In Sydney he stayed with a friend of a friend who ogled him when he did yoga in the nude, maybe it was his nuts hanging upside down, she looked big-eyed interested and then grew glum, disappointed he didn’t make a move on her. His yogic spunkiness seemed to have everyone wanting him but he was determined to stick with the celibate ideal and be a gay Mahatma.
He split Sydney quick and hitched to Armidale where he visited his old mentor, Compassion, who was living in a converted sheep-shearing shed in the Moonbi Ranges, calling it “The Valley of Peace”, somewhat of a misnomer as there was the annoying clitter-clatter of a lunatic called Sri Richard poking at an ancient typewriter night and day. The Old Fool had attracted a long line of quixotic edge-dwellers in his extraordinary soul-quest but for spiritual schizophrenia Richard baked the nutty-cake, he contained seven warring souls born into the one body, all of them constantly arguing with each other. He wrote an endless stream of madness, shattering the peace with incessant tap-tapping on the antique keys, driving the old boy to despair, he who only wanted peace and meditative quiet for the last stage of his life. Arthur resorted to one of his own twenty-one personalities, the warrior, and threw the damned typewriter out the window and pushed Sri Richard out of the shed after it.
Living in a cowshed nearby was Compassion’s chief acolyte, Roger, who was always on a grape fast, skinny as a tick, hair awry, more ascetic than John the Baptist, Arthur in awe of his gaunt, omniscient charisma. This odd gang of crackpot monks was joined by Daphne, dubbed Flower Mother because she brought them yummy food to get in their good graces. She was a renegade housewife from Armidale who broke in horses for a living but was jaded with her country-bumpkin life and longed for something more extraordinary. Like Lilith in the Garden she eventually tempted the abstinent Roger to fall from his stoic pillar and enjoy carnal lust with her and they became a hot item, holding onto one’s essential juices forgotten in the orgy. They hit the road, eschewing the yoga camp and the husband and kids in Armidale, eventually to have a Christian-conversion experience at the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin where they had a visitation from Jesus Christ himself, possibly after imbibing gold-top mushrooms. Forsaking old Compassion, declaring him to be in league with the devil and yoga a satanic pagan practice, they went on to be proselytising missionaries in the backwaters of the third world.
In between these personality breakdowns at the Valley of Peace local cow-cockeys would come raiding through the misty nights on their horses and dump bags of manure upon every surface of the yogi’s little shanty town, and poor old Compassion would shrug in resignation, long-suffering in his attempt at yogic tranquility. He saw himself as the “Fool on the hill”, radiating ecstatic wisdom, writing poetry, singing daily a paean to his God and existence, what he called Sat (Truth) Chit (Consciousness) Ananda (Bliss). Arthur and his fellow acolytes saw him as a Holy man of yore, as if he were an Illuminati of the wilderness and they adored him unreservedly. His core wisdom was, “Meditate on AUM in your heart. That’s all you need to do.”
The ongoing cosmic soap-opera down on the sheep-farm wore thin for Arthur, Sri Richard hollering hallucinations, Flower Mother babbling flower-power clichés, the townsmen shouting, “You dirty poofter hippies!” And Compassion chanting Sanskrit prayers to the tune of the Beatles “Let It Be.” A mate from the yoga school in Melbourne showed up and he marched about naked with the rest of them, an enormous donkey dick swinging free that drove Arthur crazy, his idea fixe impossible to disengage with and thus his Kundalini energy flow in danger of never getting past his groin. Listening to Compassion’s anecdotes of life on the side of the road in marvellous India had him hankering for the highway and the exotic mysteries of the sub-continent so far away.
“There’s nothing you won’t find there that you can’t find in your own backyard,” said the old fool to Arthur when bidding his dear friend a fond farewell.
“I want to discover where we come from in this Universe and where we go when the body dies, and what the meaning of this journey on Earth is all about. Who am I?”
“There is no before or after, looking for meaning is your mind playing tricks, meanings are manifold, there’s one under every rock, there’s only AUM, the world is, you are, relax, enjoy.”
“Sure, OK then, I’ll enjoy the road, the adventure of seeking the unobtainable. Farewell mate, I pray we meet in nirvana.”
Arthur went back out on the highway leaving Compassion to the mercies of his crackbrained groupies, desiring that his own Kismet was to continue his fabulous journey into the unknown, alone, just like his old mentor had done.
Passing through Noosa in Queensland he taught yoga at a Yoga convention and for awhile he grooved with the surfer-set upon the pristine beach of Noosa Heads. It was there he ate his first gold-top mushroom and tripped out dementedly, declaring he’d been transported to another dimension, crawling into a corner of the shared house in terror of his new-found friends. They looked like alien creatures calling to him from the other side of the mirror, he was trapped in the ‘other world’ and it took hours to calm him down. This reinforced his sense of alienation in contemporary society, he didn’t belong, like a vagabond he hitch-hiked fast to Townsville and across Queensland to Broken Hill.
While out on the infinite highway he set a truck alight when he threw his cigarette from the cabin window. They roared through a desert-town with the truck’s load in flames and all the townspeople waving and pointing in dismay. The surly truck-driver wanted to beat the shit out of him and ditch him but he came in handy later when the truck broke down in the middle of the desert and he had to remain with it to protect it from looters while the driver went off for assistance.
On the last stretch into Darwin Arthur was picked up by a rich young farmer in a sports car who whined on and on about his loneliness and sexual disappointment in an empty station-house, and begged him to return to the farm to live with him as his boyfriend. It stunned Arthur to realise homos could be found all over Auz, from cities to the deep bush, no matter the prohibitions, but he thought the guy was “daggy” and “icky”, he couldn’t delay his grand quest for such a pathetic liaison, especially as he was determined to stay celibate, so he apologetically kept refusing no matter how much the poor guy pleaded and cajoled. The farmer repetitively made grabs at his crotch and with one last adamant refusal Artie leaped from the sports car on the outskirts of the city and limped on into Darwin.
There he slept on the streets, huddling amongst fellow itinerants on monsoon swept verandas, harassed by the xenophobic rednecks of a frontier-town, miners and cowboys who called out, “Get a job ya fucking lazy hippie bum!” He tried to befriend the local Aborigines but was segregated from them by burly truncheon-wielding cops, he was moved on wherever he sat and this went on for a week while he waited for his aeroplane flight out of his blessed homeland.
Finally he flew to Singapore and for the first time in his life truly experienced the exotic “Other”, the foreign land. The sampans in the canals, the fried noodles on the street and the wall-posters of mutilated genitals warning of venereal disease, all a graphic reminder that he was no longer within the comfortable confines of white-fortress Australia. He caught a train to Kuala Lumpur and found the Muslim State too straight-laced, uptight puritanical for his liking, though in the future punters from Tidy-town Singapore would rush there when they wanted to have fun. He felt the opposite in Bangkok, where chaos ruled and the city whirled like a maelstrom with traffic that stampeded up every footpath. Thai students were rioting for Democracy and being shot on the streets, all of it just a picturesque backdrop to the giant, reclining Bodhisattva for one brainless gawking tourist like Arthur.
It was here he smoked his first joint of strong Buddha marijuana with some old Australian acquaintances he ran into in a seedy hotel and got so paranoid he thought they were out to rob him of his precious travelers cheques, eventually tossing his bag of pot in the gutter convinced that every Thai man he met was a secret policeman or an informer.
He hitchhiked to the north of Thailand way up near the border with Cambodia, not realising in his hippie flakiness that within a hundred kilometres the Americans were bombing the place to hell. The Thai countryside was magnificent and the Thai people were incredibly kind and attentive, he was truly abroad, an innocent to whom the world shone brightly. On the great Thai highway he took up with an Australian soldier who’d gone AWOL from the Vietnam War and they attempted mateship during their sojourn in the infamous heroin-trade town of Chiang-Mai. The deserter had a yen for Thai prostitutes and dragged gangs of them into their Hotel room, demanding Arthur fuck the giggling girls with him to seal their bond of friendship. The guy was extremely taciturn and right-wing, he still believed in the war, money was what counted and all poofters should drop dead. They argued much of the time and eventually fell out over a Bruce Lee movie, to take the girls with them or not, and Arthur stormed out of the cinema to go his own separate way with much relief.
Arthur got it in his head suddenly that he wanted to be a Buddhist monk and he applied to the Chiang-Mai Monastery for admittance. A wise old Abbot, who made a big show of drinking Coca-Cola and smoking cigarettes, interviewed him and giggled at Arthur’s every remark. He asked Arthur to think about his impending vow of renunciation and to meet him again on the other side of Bangkok in a week. Back in Bangkok Arthur got hustled by some male prostitutes, and though too paranoid to follow through and act upon their blandishments, his aroused desires reminded him of what he was, a poofter running from his shadow trying to gird his loins and, as the city’s traffic was too horrendous he gave up half way to his meeting with the Buddhist Abbot, deciding he could wait till India for his big stab at being an austere monk. He caught a train to the Island of Penang in Malaysia where he knew a ship to India could be found.
Exploring the beaches of Penang he discovered an abandoned grass hut in which he squatted for a week till his ship left port. A young Australian man, who had been working in the West Australian mining camps and was starved for affection, befriended Arthur in his paradise and camped with him in the hut. Arthur’s pledge of celibacy melted in the boy’s adoring gaze, he’d gone many months without sex, had just turned twenty-two and was horny as hell. They made love in the surf as if it was “From Here to Eternity” and Arthur was sorely tempted to linger on under the coconut trees, the grass hut on the beach was like something out of a “Bali Hai” dream, and the guy was extremely passionate and sweet, the kind of boyfriend Arthur had long yearned for. But he recalled his vow, nirvana or die, he kissed the boy goodbye, his ship to India was calling and he must be off, the lone wanderer, across the Bay of Bengal.
