A Fine Excess: an Australian Odyssey

By Gary Corseri

Hes caught in a rip tide off Kuta Beach in Bali: no ones on shore to help; every time he cries out, the waters rush over him.

Tony Speed is in free-fall. Near 30, a victim of the budget ax, hes lost his first real job as an Instructor at a southern university. Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and John Lennonthe gods of his idolatry--all tell him to get out, just go. So he takes his lifes savings and chases his Japanese girlfriend to Tokyo. But Yoshiko dances to a different drummer, and before he knows it, Speeds in Southeast Asia, knocked silly by a rip tide. That rip is the books central metaphor, as Speed travels through Asia and the Lucky Country of Australia, watching the fragmented pieces of his life play out like a kaleidoscope.

Set in Bali and Australia, with flashbacks to Japan and the States, A Fine Excess is a novel that reads fast and goes deepan On the Road for the new millennium--with a foot in this floating world, and a wing in the spiritual realms of East and West. It's a book about the adventure of discovery, integrating our whirling selves with the mirroring chaos and beauty of the world.

Whats Speed searching for, what does he want? An affirming vision wholenesssomeone and some place to hold onto. Its the mid-70s, after all. Vietnam, Watergate, a worldwide recession form the crazy quilt hes woven into. He joins Aussie friends Peter and Kay in hurricane-ravaged Darwin where hes harassed by the local bar faunaOckers. With fellow wayfarer Dacy, he hitches a ride through the outback in a Holden station wagon piggybacking a lorry, the red dust of the Simpson Desert clogging every pore. In Coober Pedy, the mole-like denizens burrow into caves to escape the heat while ferreting night and day for fire-lit opals. Its all Dante-esqueand exhilarating!

Speed finds work in Adelaide, picking grapes for a winery. He settles in for a month of love-making with Colleen, a funny, pretty Canadian scientist who despises Aussie men. Tempted to linger, Speed finds he cant shake the memory of Jeri, the American woman he met in Indonesia who is now in Sydney. On his way to her, he stops off in Melbourne, where he re-joins Peter and Kay. Theyre in the process of breaking up, and Speed gets caught in the inevitable rip.

A couple of weeks later, hes keeling into Jeris orbit. But shes involved with two other men. Only when he can recognize the quiet charm of Carol, Jeris reticent roommate, does Speed find peace and love. He finally gets his revelation, his Zen slap, through Dennie, Carols quadriplegic cousin. In the sad and luminous figure of Dennie, the suffering, acceptance, gratitude and grace at the core of the religious traditions of the East and West finally converge.

All journeys are beginnings. This is a book about beginning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 20, 2000
• ISBN: 9781453565858

Book preview

A FINE EXCESS:

An Australian Odyssey

Gary Corseri

Copyright © 2001 by Gary Corseri.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Xlibris

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Contents

Part One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

Part Two

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess . . . it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

—John Keats

Part One

1

A Sunset in Bali

Pretending to be sun-bathing, Speed watches through one half-opened eye, as the child moves slowly and surely on the white, hot sand. It seems as though her tawny limbs have carried her a thousand years; it seems they’ll carry her a thousand more. One hand steadies the basket on her head and the other holds a metal container with ice and Western soft drinks. Cigarettes, straw fans, hats, and little carved birds of polished wood drift in the basket.

She’s the one he had spoken to the day before—twelve years old, with light brown skin, dramatic dark eyes, and a pretty pout when a customer won’t buy.

He stretches his body languorously in the hot, Balinese sand. Raising his head slightly, he can see wave-swallowing-wave crash down. Only the skinny dark man, squatting by his driftwood altar thirty yards in front of him, ripples his isolation.

His father’s words call back to him, out of the dream:

Tell us your plan. You gotta have a plan.

The meaty, once-handsome face bobs in front of him. The white eyebrows signal weariness, but the eyes are still bright for battle—in the condo in Miami . . .

But now the girl is watching him closely. She settles the basket and container in front of him. Ceremoniously, she smoothes a straw mat on the sand and lays out her wares.

What you want?’ she asks, kneeling in the sand, her tone impudent. You want Coke?" Reaching for a bottle, she holds it out to him. It sweats in her hand.

He leans back on his elbows, playing the game. Still squatting, she purses her lips, makes sand whorls with her other hand. She creases her brow, tilts her head. So?

How much? he asks with a shrug.

How much you say?

Fifty rupiah.

Aiee! she cries, shaking her head, waving her hand at him like she’s burned it. She picks up his woven cloth shoulder bag. How much you pay this one?

Six hundred.

Aiee! Too much. I sell you cheaper. She clucks her tongue.

He smiles at the expected response. They all try to be friends with you, it’s part of the game. He’ll buy the Coke so she’ll come visit him again tomorrow. But he wants her company a little longer. He reaches into the pocket of the shoulder bag and brings out fifty rupiah.

What’s that? She appraises the money with contempt. She curls up her nose.

For the Coke. he says.

Ai . . . It’s very hot, yes? She fans herself with one of the straw hats. You want hat?

He puts the money back, stretches supine, hands behind his neck. I don’t even want the Coke. As the sun of Asia pulses in the sky, he feels himself melt into its heart.

What you want doesn’t exist in this world, his father was saying in the dream. You don’t even know what you want.

The face and voice petitioned him, appealed in some way he could not explain. His father was a medley of complacency, male strength and vulnerability. A second generation American who had made it.

He couldn’t look into his father’s eyes. I know what I want, he said softly.

What you want? the girl asks now. Opening his eyes, he’s half-surprised to find her still perching by his side. Her pouting reminds him of Yoshiko, how she looked the last day he’d seen her.

Down the beach the motorcyclists buzz crazily between him and Kuta, the main tourist compound. The surf roar swallows their whining two-strokes.

Serious, the girl says. How much you say?

Can’t you be serious? his father said. Anthony . . . look at the world.

Lame from the war, his father hobbled closer, a wry smile twitching at his lips. I don’t like it, either . . . Your mother and me, you think we liked it? We did for you and the other two— that’s all . . . You steal a little here, and a little there. I don’t say it’s right, it’s just how it is. Everyone wants to be a nice guy until it comes to his own. You’ll see. You’re no different. Nobody will make room for you. I tried to tell your brother, Frank, God rest his soul! What’s he gotta prove, huh? You tell me. What did he have to prove? What a man he is? How strong he is? You’ll see. Nobody will make room for you if you don’t grab it. Not your country, not your people, not the nice, smart people where you work . . . You think of number one. You think of your family. That’s all.

Do you think it’s like this everywhere?

The wry smile deepened. The eyes, watery with six decades of disappointments, searched out his son’s. Here—he thumped a little too hard with two fingers above Speed’s heart—here it’s the same.

Hey! the girl says. You all right? She studies him with her head tilted. "You talking to somebody?

Are you still here? Okay, how ‘bout a hundred?

She pouts, arches her brows. One hundred fifty. Final offer.

All right . . . But you must let me sketch you.

He takes out his pencils and sketch pad. Her brown skin shows off her smile. Where you from? she asks. France?

The fingers work quickly, deftly. No.

Australie?

No . . . America.

Ah . . . She strums an imaginary banjo with her open hand. Very rich.

Some people . . .

You are so dark.

He points to the sun.

You have girlfriend?

Just you.

You always joking . . . Serious . . .

Used to . . . no more . . .

She catches his tone, clucks her tongue in sympathy.

The motorcyclists race up the beach, jockey their bikes like horses, ride the back wheels and crash in the sand. Speed instinctively hates them. Behind him, a few Balinese men watch with their arms folded. The strange, dark, skinny man watches, too.

Digging the wheels into the soft sand, throwing it up behind them, like insects spraying their foes, yelling at each other, they try to smash each other. They would be Australians in their late teens—tall and athletic, they seem almost too healthy next to the slender Balinese. Bali is just another place to get pissed. Get pissed and vomit their guts out, and then get pissed again.

Why they do that? the girl asks.

She watches the pencil work, leans over to see her image. Ah, very pretty, yes?

Yes . . . You must hold still.

He hears the cycles’ roar. His eyes narrow as the girl pouts. He moves the line of the mouth down slightly until he catches it.

Why they do that? she asks again.

Emptiness, he says apologetically.

Is good, yes? she asks, about the drawing.

But he knows he’ll never get it right. He might imitate the Balinese style, but he would always miss the natural rhythm of their lines. He knew he’d always be a dilettante With a flourish he signs his name, and gives the girl the sketch.

For me?

Present . . .

He tilts the Coke bottle against his lips, surprised by its strange tactility. The sweet, cool syrup-seltzer tingles down his throat.

You want other one? the girl asks.

"Tidok. I’m full." He pats his stomach.

No charge, she says.

No charge? He smiles at her generosity.

She smiles shyly. For the first time, a real smile. You different, she says. What your name?

Speed.

He watches the young men on the cycles, anger and sadness welling in his blood. At last, tiring of their circular games, or wanting a larger audience, they point their snouts towards Kuta.

The girl sighs wearily, beyond her twelve years. The basket floats to her head; and suddenly, she’s standing. I go, she announces. Have a nice day.

You too.

I come back tomorrow, yes?

Yes . . . What’s your name?

Vennie. Is good, yes?

He holds up his thumb. Number One!

She smiles, showing an incredible array of perfect, white teeth. You Number One, too, she says.

He watches her go and suddenly feels lonely. He wants to call her back, buy another Coke and share her spirit. But it would be unfair to take up too much of her time. The few rupiah she makes from the tourists help support her family. Better she should walk the beaches than walk the streets of Denpasar.

Soon the Balinese men standing behind him are also gone, wandering down the beach to find their particular places to watch the sunset. Only the skinny dark man remains. Speed nods and the man nods back, then looks at the sea again.

Who was he? How long had he been there, squatting? Even in Indonesia, he was remarkable. Much darker than the others, with Negroid hair, parted in the middle, gray on one side, black the other—his scalp made Speed think of the Yin-Yang symbol of the Tao. Now he was squatting beside an abstract pattern of driftwood randomly tied together, about five feet high. Speed had taken a careful look once when the man wasn’t there, but it made no sense to him. Yet, it looked like it might make sense to someone, somehow. Sparsely decorated with old feathers and strings of shells that dangled haphazardly, it seemed a kind of shrine.

The first day Speed had arrived, he’d taken the man for an Australian Aborigine, and he’d congratulated himself on seeing some sort of vision of his future. But now the man’s imperturbability disquiets him. He would almost prefer one of the hawkers to approach him, to say something human. He thinks about accosting the dark man, but the man’s attitude is alert indifference and aloofness. Besides, what on earth could he say to him?

It’s one hour before sunset. The freaks will be congregating in another hour. His new friends, Peter and Kay, will come down from the losman to watch the sunset with him. It’s the fourteenth sunset he’s seen in Bali. The clouds will assume fantastic shapes of good and evil and the wind will come alive. The wind will sing of his past and future.

He looks behind him: the pond fronds wave against a copper sky. In front of him: the ocean swells ominously—as it had that time in Japan.

For Yoshiko’s sake he’d gone there, hoping she would enfold him in her culture’s wings. She’d been his student in the States, and then his lover. It’s three months since he’s seen her, but it seems much longer. He’s been in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia since.

What do you want? she’d asked.

To feel real.

I don’t understand such a thing.

He looked out over the sea he’d flown across to be with her. He spoke slowly, forming his words carefully. Thoreau spoke about living deliberately . . . I want to escape . . . hamburgers, and plastic . . . and television . . . I want to throw myself against the universe and see if I bounce . . . I want to live by my wits and the grace of God . . . I want to make something—something no one else has made, or can make.

But the question was still on her face. I don’t understand what is your plan?

The plan . . .

So he told her again. He would find a job teaching English. She would continue her translation work. As soon as they had saved enough money, they would get out of Tokyo.

Ah yes, she said, as though hearing it for the first time.

And that night they’d drunk Suntory whisky and celebrated in their lovemaking. But a week later she was uncertain again. Onna gokoro to aki no sora! the Japanese said. A woman’s heart and the autumn weather . . .

They walked along the polluted bay and she shook her head. They had been silent for a long time. What is it? he asked.

It is hard to say, she said softly. Can we sit?

They sat in the sand. They could see a hint of the setting sun’s shape and color through the haze.

I cannot marry to you, she said slowly. You have no plan.

I told you my plan, he protested. What’s wrong?

She sighed, on the verge of tears. My father is ill. I told you.

He’s not that ill.

Someone must take care to him. I told you.

I can’t work here unless we’re married, he said again. You know that.

He threw a stick of driftwood at a covey of terns, scattering them. His resentment kindled, he wondered why he bothered. Their moments of uneasiness were as common as those of pleasure. He suspected that deep down she distrusted him, she just didn’t know him.

But when he looked at her he wanted to hold her. She was petite and beautiful, fragile as a Japanese doll. But the romantic impulse was his. He sought a life of spiritual simplicity, dreamed them nesting on a mountainside while he taught English in a village school—poor, self-sufficient, happy. She responded at times, caught up in the strangeness of his fantasies. She’d curse Tokyo’s crowds, snuggle against him, call him a crazy gaijin. She’d cover his face with little kisses, swearing no one could make her happier.

A day would pass and her doubts would return. Her complexities attracted him: it awed him how anyone could be so tiny and so hard and determined.

He desired her: the silk of her haunches, her soft murmuring. But he never knew when she would turn away from him, spooled back into the silken ball she’d unwound from. Sometimes, she said, she thought she would never marry.

He took her hand and said he loved her. The words sounded dry somehow. She was silent.

I don’t know what you want, he said at last. Do you want me to go? I can go . . .

She shook her head. No . . . I do not want . . .

I don’t understand . . .

But he did. She was high class. Her father did not approve of him. In her deepest heart neither did she. He had wanted her to show him the temples, she had shown him the glitter of the Ginza. He read the ancient haiku poets; she danced to a disco beat. He knew he had romanticized her. He had seized upon an image and shaped it to his will and need. Her return to her father’s country had neatly coincided with his termination at the university. Most love, he figured, was just good timing.

Now the sound of peddlers wending their way towards him disrupts his reverie. Over the next fifty yards, there are a few scattered Westerners, and the peddlers would approach each one separately, offering Cokes, beers, cakes, batik shirts, sarongs.

The surf surges towards him: beckoning; threatening.

He runs fast, dives into the first wave, feels himself punched back.

He had run to Tokyo for her sake, and she had left him at a subway station, standing alone in his language.

He had run to Bangkok. The black clouds of gasoline descended with the sun as the Honda two-stroke taxis brought the whores to Patpong’s Grace Hotel where fat German businessmen bought sister acts for the price of beers back home. He’d gone to the massage parlors and saw the girls in their white dresses sitting Church-prettily on pews behind a two-way mirror, and the Chinese manager said, Only clean girls here. Almost virgins. And he’d walked away.

He’d stood on the roof of the Malaysian Hotel and felt his heart hammering as the murk descended and Bangkok plugged up and in, the temples corroded, blistered, running like sores; and the city a vast computer throbbing in the tropic heat, a cancer of cathodes and diodes eating oxygen, oxen and hootches. The hot streets beckoned below and he lay down coldly on the concrete roof and beat his stomach to make the gnawing stop and told himself reasons not to die.

Four months, and he hardly knew where he’d been, just that he had to keep going, that he’d never felt more alive—nor closer to death.

The colors deepen now. The sky turns over, curls on itself like mystical dragons, as, behind him, the spears of palm fronds pierce the deepening red. Still no sign of Peter and Kay . . .

He strides into the rushing water. The surf is powerful, warm, pulls him with every draining ebb. There is a strange, red light riding the waves, some twenty feet in front of him. It’s like a balloon of red heat, and he can’t be sure if he’s not imagining it, that he’s simply looked too long at the sun. He walks towards it, gets in up to his waist. The current is stronger than he’s ever felt it. It pulls him to his right. He strides against it, feeling strong, at the apex of his manhood in his 29th year.

The water is up to his chest. He jumps with a wave—ebullient. He jumps with another and another and laughs to himself over the pounding surf. He is in Bali! He is almost thirty!

Bastards! he shouts to the surf. Son-of-a-bitch bastards! He wants to give a rebel yell. He has never done that.

He takes his trunks off, inserts his right arm through one of the legs and rolls it up to his shoulder. The surf massages his naked body, bobbles his testicles.

Perhaps he can come this way, screwing the Pacific . . .

He thinks of Jeri, the American woman he’d met in Sumatra. He would send her a card, try to see her in Sydney.

The disappointments don’t matter anymore. They have all been necessary to spur him on, to keep him going.

He just wants to keep going now.

There is something in people that wants to put down roots, and there is something in them that wants to tear out roots and fly.

Maybe it’s true, he thinks; maybe they’re right. He doesn’t know what he wants. He knows, but he doesn’t. Things keep changing more quickly than he can attach a name to anything, and he just wants to live freely and reverently in a world that doesn’t seem to care.

The red ball of light rises again on the crest of a wave. He moves towards it. He jumps with a wave, but doesn’t come down on the ground.

He swims towards shore, his arm