Tara comics

Not in my experience

Here’s a story that isn’t my own but has become one I tell, the story of Brandy the dog. Maybe utterance is better. If you are a person who separates story from plot, there are some events, some happenings, in a sequence, possibly fictional, from which to draw meaning from. They certainly meet the criteria for one version of what makes a story, even if it is my own incomplete one.

This story always starts with a discussion of dogs. Discussions to do with dogs have limited directions. Comfortingly ritualistic, they tend towards listing. List the things you know about dogs. Everyone gets a turn. If someone mentions a breed of dog you have owned, you are allowed to say something about that dog. If you also know something about the dog a person is discussing, you are able to say something too. If you don’t know the dog, you may ask questions about its temperament or habits. Don’t settle on one dog too long. Other people have dogs they want to discuss. And, if someone mentions that they like big dogs, I get to say, “Dad had a St Bernard called Brandy.”

I have a habit of narrating other people’s experiences. I catalogue them, match them to other situations, exhibit them.  In some sense we all become museums of the people in our lives. Involuntary display cases. Vast. Bewildering. Sheathed in glass. But I shove other people’s stories to the front while mine languish in the backrooms. They are my go-to when interacting with the world.

“I had a friend who…”

“My husband used to…”

“My brother, John, thinks…”

“My Dad had a St Bernard called Brandy.”

I think this is because I lack confidence in my own experiences. They don’t take up space. Or they haven’t been inflated. My experiences end, as Elliot says, like the world, ‘not with a bang but a whimper’. Even this is over-stating it, adding too much proverbial egg. I need to bolster my insubstantial narrative voice with allusions and posturing. By rubbing up against Elliot’s hollow men I can give the void an illusion of meaning.

First and foremost, it must be said, Brandy, my father’s St Bernard, was a racist dog. That is one of the ways the story starts.

My own anecdotes are all beginnings, and, if I ever venture to start them, I realise they aren’t going anywhere mid-sentence. It’s not the feeling of running out of train tracks; It’s the feeling that there never was a train. It’s in these awful moments that I perceive the eyes of my audience glazing over and mine do too. I wish the glazing to be sticky, thick and sweet. To distract. To distract from the fact that I have nothing. I hope for my story to be snatched away from me, while we clean the yummy from our eyes, to be completed by another. It’s the opposite of wanting to catch the pass-the-parcel. It’s the conviction that someone else could finish it better.  Help me complete it, I yearn. Save me from myself. I’m incomplete. I don’t have the stamina for the end.

My aunt had Brandy put-down while my father was out of the country. That’s another way the story starts. And ends.

Privately, I’ve always found it hard thinking of Brandy as a boy-dog. My associations with his name are markedly gendered in the other direction. The other Brandys I’ve known of are a namesake of an alcohol-induced conception and a pop-singer.  What dog-Brandy has in common with the other two Brandys, apart from his name, is that I never met him. He died before I was born. His end was before my beginning. Brandy-the-alcohol-tribute was a girl from another school who I was told about at a party. The drunk girl regaling me with this information had blond ringlets that bounced as she trumpeted the origin of her friend’s name and that of her sister, Midori. The drunk girl’s name was Bailey. She was drinking Baileys. I have no understanding of whether this story was a defence of her choice of liquor or an attempt to conjure some illusion of solidarity in numbers. I wasn’t drinking. This makes people nervous.

Later that night my friend, Catherine, would get too drunk on peach shnappes, pass out and leave a gluggy trail of drool on somebody’s mattress. I called her parents. I helped her into the car. The story left me there.

Brandy left Scotland for Malawi in a custom-made dog box, “They don’t make them that big”, and took an “instant disliking” to the indigenous population. This makes me feel uncomfortable. Having been disowned for his potential to eat sheep, Brandy turned his aggression towards ‘the other’.

Brandy was not always my father’s dog. He wasn’t there at the beginning. Dad was asked to take him on because his original owner’s neighbours were farmers. The farmers said that if Brandy killed a sheep, they would shoot him. I imagine these farmers as sensible people who looked on with horror at their neighbours ill-considered choice of dog. Sensible and practical. I don’t believe they were bluffing. Brandy’s owners were out of their depth. They did not like to be reminded of their neighbour’s practical guns and were secretly relieved that they would not have to maintain this growing mountain of a dog, so they found a man who would love him and he was shipped to Africa.

If I am not telling the story, if it has been mercifully taken over by my father or my mother, at this point I will ask, “Wasn’t Brandy hot in Malawi?” Somehow the answer, “No”, always slips from my grasp because it doesn’t seem possible that 100kg of dog could be happy in Africa. Yet, apparently, apart from his dislike of Africans, Brandy thrived. He was fed on grain and vegetables, given regular rabies injections and slept a lot. A good dog life. The way Dad tells it, Brandy was pretty well-behaved, not a sheep killer but a gentle giant. At least, he was good after Dad punched him in the face. Dad broke his hand but established himself as top dog.

My mother only met Brandy once but, because there is a photo of her and the dog, I think of Brandy as her dog too. Mum is so beautiful in the photo, neatly dressed, red hair vibrant, fresh faced. The dog reaches her shoulder, clearly twice her weight. She is standing stiffly, not out of fear but because it’s cold. They aren’t in Africa. It’s after Brandy was moved back to Scotland to live with my Nan and aunt, when he was past his sheep-eating prime. I only recently discovered that this was because Dad’s first marriage broke up. The photo is of Mum meeting the nearest thing Dad had, at that point, to a child. Many years later she would inherit my dog after the break-up of my marriage. She is wearing white socks. Maybe she hadn’t realised how cold it would be.

Brandy’s end is simple and off-stage. And, as with the beginning, Dad wasn’t present. Brandy had to be put down because he had developed epilepsy. 100kgs of epileptic St Bernard was not something my Nan and aunt could face. They were upset about it, they told my father. They were upset about it still by the first time I heard the story. All involved would assure themselves, “But 11 years is a good life for a big dog”. Nobody wants to terminate someone else’s beloved pet.

Much later, both Nan’s and my aunt’s deaths would happen off-stage for Dad as well. He would be in a different country, again, too much water away.

Baader-Meinhof. Not that long ago, I wrote a facebook status that said simply that. A friend discretely messaged me, soon after, to ensure that I hadn’t been trying to enter the term into a search engine and that sense of humiliation still colours the way I think about the phenomenon. I remember that and I think, sometime that’s going to come back around on the facebook memories thing – sometime, I’m going to be tempted out of perversity, to hit that share button. No, not perversely. Heroically. The re-share will undo the ambiguity of the first post, turning it into a deliberate act and I will triumph over my shame.

Except I won’t. Because then there’s Hamilton. Hamilton the musical.

I didn’t ignore Hamilton. I didn’t notice it. Friends, colleagues, students had been talking to me about it with a kind of fervour for over a year and I had nodded, saying, “No, can’t say that I’ve heard of it.” Odd that I never felt compelled to look it up. Odd that it didn’t stick. The enthusiasm that people have for that musical is a force. It gushes, unashamedly. The people who had told me about it were electrified and I greeted this with a dull, slippery confusion. Their fanishness was not going to stick to me. Whatever this thing was, – a musical did they say? – it wasn’t for me. Such was my ambivalence that I wasn’t able to connect that these people, people I liked, respected, were all talking to me about the same thing. It washed over and past me, dissipating into nothing.

The moment that lit the trail towards Baader-Meinhof style realisation in hindsight was a friend’s instagram of her daughter, Ruby, in January. She, gleefully, holds her arms out to the Broadway sign as if introducing it. She is contorted sideways, looking backwards and upwards at once, legs planted apart in the manner of the logo. While obscured by backlighting, her look is a mix of reverence and concentration. I wanted to know why anyone would look at a sign that way. What was this thing? Why was Ruby excited?

Enter Pop Culture Happy Hour. The podcast that will tell you all you need to know about a thing. Except it didn’t enter. It had been there for a while.  Now, I remembered. I had seen Hamilton before. I’d scrolled past it countless times. It wasn’t just a town South of Auckland that I was incredibly reluctant to visit. It was sought after. People wanted it. And I remember another thing. The book.

My friend Aimee has a book which she is extremely protective of. Her book on Hamilton. It has, of and on, sat on her desk at work for over a year. The way she touches it resembles a caress – as if she’s checking that it still exists. The first time she brought it into school she had held it out to me like Rafiki holding Simba. All that had registered was that this book was special to her for some reason. I had listened to my friend, more than once, talk about this show while she held the book to her and I had not heard a word. My mind had skulked off to other corners. I was not present.

Pop Culture Happy Hour recommended the cast album. So I listened to it – on shuffle at first, which I don’t recommend. The temporal dissonance of the non-linear Hamilton could probably stand as a metaphor for my entire association with the musical.  I did it in the wrong order. I wasn’t entirely sure who lived or died. I thought Burr was the hero. I had missed something essential.

Then I learned how to turn shuffle off on Spotify and it displaced The Mountain Goats as my favourite music to run to. I listened to it again and again. On loop. Non-stop. 

But I still had one more realisation to make. This was not the realisation that I had been a bad friend by passively dismissing interests, although this was important to attend to. No, this came back to the city in New Zealand of the same name.

I’m really glad I never said to anyone, “Did you know the guy who composed the music for Moana is from Hamilton?” Although, if I had, the same ambiguity that had confused me, may have saved me.

This was a fact that I had learned at the NZ premier of Moana, an ultimately hollow spectacle of blue light and drums despite the really good kapa haka. Lin-Manuel Miranda was there, I think. He was interviewed, soundbite style, beforehand. Perhaps I had been distracted by the children who were waiting for the film to start. I thought it was mean to make them wait and I was anxious that I had forgotten my bike lights and would be riding in the dark because it had gotten so late. Or perhaps it was because I had kicked over my complementary popcorn and was not sure that I’d picked it all up. I felt bad that there was so much free popcorn. I also felt relieved that I had kicked it over because this meant that I would not eat a carton of food that I did not like. But still, I had wondered why more of a fuss hadn’t been made of him. This was a guy from New Zealand who had written the music for a Disney feature and they were doing bits with actors!

I wondered later, too. Multiple times. A guy from Hamilton, I thought. Wow. Surely that’s as big a deal as Lorde, I’d thought. The idea was entrenched. That’s why, even after becoming a fan, it still took me months to fix that last misconception, to bring it into line with my new understanding.

Now, of course, I see Hamilton everywhere. I see Miranda’s influence in students’ poetry. Smug allusions pop. I see it in my past. Memories of conversations make sense now, even if my past self remains impassive and unmovable. I recall my ex-husband measuring his work ethic against Hamilton’s. Although, this could be a false construction. He did always work like he was running out of time.

This leads to an obvious line of self-doubt. I wonder what else I am not paying attention to. What else I am missing. What new humiliations of misinformation I have in store for myself. But I also think about Ruby under that sign, looking backwards and upwards at once, and get the sense that there are people who will tell me. And, eventually, I might listen.

A friend said to me recently that point of view is the single most important question in storytelling. That wasn’t at the top of my mind when I wrote this, because I do have a long history of being frozen by the idea that I will never be anyone else, but it must have been simmering there underneath the surface, waiting to merge with other ideas for it came back to me just as I was uploading this. Comics, for me, don’t hold as much power in the point of view department as other mediums. I don’t think, for example, that we become Peter Parker when reading a Spider-man comic, no matter how compelling the first person banter-narration-voice-over is. We are positioned on his side, sure. We get slightly more insight into his world, but we don’t really get to be him in the way that we would if he was in prose form. Maybe a comic happens more outside of our head then. I guess, in that sense, comics are more like the experience of reading a play than a novel.

Partly the comment about being stuck in our own point of view comes from re-reading Elizabeth Knox’s Dreamhunter and Dreamquake. She calls her dreamhunters who can perform dreams in multiple points of view, “novelists”. This got me thinking about whether novels can provide a true immersion in a character’s point of view, like, perhaps, a dream can, or whether we are still ultimately ourselves when we read. I think our self is always there. My self is. Lurking.

I became alarmed, a while ago, with the phrase “I’m taken with you”. I began to have images of mutually assured abduction, as if by saying the phrase you were implicating someone else in relinquishing agency, whether they wanted it or not. What if they didn’t want to come too? Now they had to. It was done. A magic spell of language had been employed and these people were leaving. The fun I usually enjoy when interpreting an idiom literally became fraught with images of a very specific alien who did not want to test or torment but wanted to watch some sort of real-life romance. Although, as far as I can tell, these beings who take us, whoever they are, are not intrusive voyeurs. Still, I am vary of invoking them, as benign as their actions seem.

None of this made it into the comic.