34. 1980 Hello Australia

1980 Hello Australia

January 10th left Baltimore for Sydney 10th Dallas
12th – 13th hospital 15-23 New Zealand 24 – 30th Sydney 31st Hawaii
March 23 Lesia to Towson April 13 left Baltimore 7.50 Am 20th Lesia to Adelaide
May 12th Lesia rang pregnant 4.45 pm August 11 Married
November – Lesia’s car accident

I left a few days earlier than the other Baltimore astrologers, flying to Dallas. We were all to meet in Los Angeles and fly to Auckland together. I wanted to see ex-sister Janet who had left a year earlier when the Order collapsed. I had been attracted to her, along with too many other sisters.
When we got to her house I had the most definite designs on having sex with her.

Twenty years later when we were in a chatroom on the Internet in 2001, I told her I wanted to go to bed with her back in 1979 and she never knew it at the time. Probably the reason she did not know when I was sitting next to her was that within a couple of hours of being at her house I
began to have a very sharp pain in my back that became more painful by the moment. Not knowing what was wrong with me Janet took me to the hospital and at the hospital, I was told I had kidney stones and I would have to stay in the hospital to have them removed. I was given whatever drugs they give to put one to sleep and when I awoke, it was the next day. I was discharged and told not to do any strenuous activity for several days and not to drink alcohol. I was definitely not to fly. Janet collected me from the hospital with only a few hours to get to the airport to make the flight to meet my group from Baltimore in Los Angeles. My hoped for a one nightstand with Janet never eventuated and whether that would have changed my future course in life is impossible to know. This is the thing about life ~ we can only know what we have experienced and what we have not experienced we can only guess at. It is such an impossibility to live what we can only imagine the results are to be; even our most remotely removed fantasy cannot do justice to an alternative. If I had not had kidney stones would Janet have reciprocated my lustful desires? If she did would I have returned to her after my trip to New Zealand and Australia? Maybe we would have stayed together, had a family, and I would not be writing ‘Leaving Australia’. I probably would be writing, ‘Leaving Texas’. So if the choices we make affect the rest of our life is there a reason for what happens when it does? I have only had a kidney stone pull a stunt on me once and that changed my direction or maybe it did not. Even if I had not doubled over in pain on Janet’s coach, I may not have ever gotten to touch her anyway. Maybe she was just being polite inviting an ex-brother over for the night. We surely did not have any romantic linkage in the Order I had the thoughts but they were never exchanged/act-out. It is too easy to think someone else shares our thoughts. We are incredibly isolated with in our head. I sit on the New York City subway writing this. The train is crowded. What is going on in anyone of these people’s heads is impossible to know.

I drank myself silly all the way to New Zealand because I was still in pain from my operation. Of course, I was taking the pain medicine
with the alcohol and whatever it was the good doctor told me about flying and drinking and pain pills did not affect my thinking enough to change my actions. The conference in New Zealand lasted for about four days but I only attended three lectures. On the first night of the conference I spent the night with a rather attractive young woman. All I remember about her was that she was a schoolteacher in Auckland.

The first of the three New Zealand girls that I interacted with at the conference I lost track of toward the beginning of my return to the States. She was the shortest and she was quite quiet. She was a schoolteacher and after the first day of the conference she came to my room and we sat and talked about astrology and the States and I showed her some of my picture-poems and soon we were making love and she spent a couple of days with me making love in between astrological lecturers and spending the nights with me then I did not see her anymore at the conference and that was it.

The next day I met two other women who invited me to visit them after the conference. I went with the first one to Christchurch and stayed with her for two or three days. We drove through the middle of the North Island talking about love and sex (men see it as the same and woman sometimes separate the two, a conversation that I have had with many women). I corresponded with her for about a year after we met but I have no idea what her name is. She had a couple of children. I still have a photo of her waving goodbye to me as I flew north to Auckland to meet the other person I had met at the conference.

I stayed with her for a couple of days and that is my memory of New Zealand; three
relationships in a week’s time then I was off to Sydney. In a folder, mementos to various pasts that I had so long forgotten I found two of three names: Lynn and Shirley. All three wrote to me for the first several months of 1980 then slowly our memories dissolved as different entities crossed and interacted within our own worlds. Twenty-four years later I would not recognize them if we passed in the streets. I have wondered at times when I saw a woman passing in the street or standing near me in an elevator, at the pub or sharing a queue with me at the bank if at some time I had made love with that person. Perhaps I have passed a person in the street that was my offspring that I never knew about – we live such fractured and passing lives. I barely remember what any of these three New Zealand girls looked like. They were all in their mid-twenties and now would be in their mid-sixties. I made them into a composite New Zealand woman.

I saw her laughing
standing at the bus stop I asked her for a date
she laughed
We went to a rave she laughed
We went to her cabin at the freeway' s
end
she laughed
She laughed as we drank wine
as we made love
as she slept
when she awoke in the morning
during our shower
at breakfast
and when I left her at the bus stop
where I first picked her up
Now every day I drive by drive-by-love
she' s always at the bus stop laughing
in the snow ~ cold ~ rain ~ hail ~ smear
Because I take life so seriously
(I have Saturn and Pluto [ both at 13.05
Leo] conjunct my Venus, Sun and MH in Leo in a Capricorn house)
She no longer has the body at the bus stop
I have never stopped to see her again
But I still hear her
especially on stormy nights
laughing
though it scares me so
someday too I will laugh like her
Her laughter
every full moon
tries so desperately to enter me
But as long as I refuse to laugh
I will never become possessed by her.
September 4th, 1994, Victor Harbor, South Australia

Lynn was the tallest of the three and she lived with her two children. I met Lynn’s mother and her children who were about seven to ten years old meaning that they would be older now than their mother was when I was with her. I do not remember anything more than driving for a day through New Zealand and spending about three days in Christchurch having a lot of sex with Lynn. We did not do any sightseeing, so I have no impressions of Christchurch except from being in bed with a tall blonde woman who told me by day three she was in love with me. I have this letter in front of me from July 2 1980 so I must have stayed in touch with her and maybe I had entertained ideas of being with her in the future but by July 1980 my life had taken an incredible and unpredictable turn. Though of course, it could be predictable because I did go to bed with a lot of woman and I never used any sort of protection from children wanting to come to this planet with me as their parent.

Dear Terrell
Got your letter the other day and am still a little stunned. It was a miserable, wet day, Saturn trine Moon radical (which isn’t nice) and for the icing on the cake – your letter. I guess its’ really obvious that I wasn’t exactly jumping in the air about it. However, if you are going to be happy – I’m happy for you. I do hope that your progressed Neptune square Venus is a positive rather that
negative effect as I would hate to see you hurt. I think you’ll be a wonderful (Leo) father. I’m only sorry that it wasn’t me who presented you with a little bundle of joy. So be it.

There were several pages to the letter that I have just found and read for the first time in more than twenty years – probably in twenty-four years. Would my life have been different if in fact she was the one who got pregnant and not an Australian? I would have started with two stepchildren, and I may have spent my life in New Zealand instead of Australia. We are where we are because of why we do not know. Every moment and every thought so totally changes the future that we cannot comprehend who we would be if something else had happened. Would I have written the painful section three of this story if Lynn had “presented you with a little bundle of joy”?

Currently teaching middle school in NYC I cannot help but question what it is about “bundles of joy” who are such pains in the classroom a decade later.

Shirley was the last one I was with. I met her at the end of the conference and she gave me her phone number. I was riding through New Zealand with Lynn after the conference and Shirley lived north of Auckland. Lynn lived in Christchurch, I flew from Christchurch to Auckland, and Shirley collected me from the airport. This is long before mobile phones. How did we decide before cell phones and the Internet? Of course, people meet one another using apps on their phones now. Stay at a hotel or conference and hook up with someone of like desire instantly only a few doors away. Shirley was the most attractive of the three from a physical perceptive, which I suppose is important when one is having one-night stands. We stayed in a rain forest type of area in a rustic looking homebuilt hippy sort of house. As I had not heard of AIDS and I was not concerned with diseases I did not use any manner of protection when I was with my glorious three New Zealanders. Shirley and I were together within a few moments of getting inside her house, I spent one night with her and the next day she drove me to the airport, and off I flew to Sydney.

New Zealand Passing Stranger

34. SYDNEY
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Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 78.