CONTACT terrell@neuage.org

14. Tofu's End

 

It was Tuesday, two days after Christmas, 1988 and the children and I were at the Myponga factory. I had made my deliveries in Adelaide the day before, Monday, and I had sent several boxes of goods to Queensland. I was cleaning the factory and Sacha and Leigh were playing with some toys that they had got on Sunday, Christmas, when they came running into the factory yelling that there was a tow truck hoisting up our pickup truck.  We had been making payments on our truck for four years and had only a few months left before it was paid off. I was three months behind in payment and our beloved truck was being repossessed. The children were crying, and I had to beg the driver of the truck to let them take their toys that they had just got for Christmas out of the truck. I told the children not to worry that they were just taking our truck to a garage because there was something wrong with the motor, but they knew more was going on. We watched our truck being pulled away.

We were stuck in a small town with no way to get home or anywhere to go and I did not have any friends to call. We did not even have a telephone in our factory. I just stood there whilst the children cried wondering what in the world would become of us. Luckily, one of the few customers of my soy deli, I think he was the only one, was driving in to get some cheesecakes and burgers and I told him what happened and asked if we could get a ride to town with him. An interesting side note is that I am writing this sixteen years after this event and I did not see this person, Andrew again, but as I was writing this section of my story I received an email from his girlfriend of the time who had found me on the Internet and thought she would say hello. I have had this happen a few times lately. When I was writing about New Orleans I received an email from someone from that time who found me on the Internet and wondered what had become of me.

I took the children to their grandparents, and I told them that they would need to take the children to Lesia’s when she returned home from work. I went to the 8th Floor of the Grenfell Centre in Adelaide. I unfortunately knew this building too well as it was also the building that housed the Family Court of Australia, where I had spent many an encounter (unsavoury encounter tours of the Australian Government type). I filled out the papers for bankruptcy and that was it. My life had just gone down the toilet. One of the conditions of bankruptcy was that I could not leave Australia for three years. I was devastated.  All I ever wanted to do was leave the country with my children. Now I had to stay for three more years. This meant that the children and I could not leave Australia until December 27, 1991. I could not even imagine how long that was. The 1990s were so far into the future that I believed I would not be able to survive that long. I wrote down the years that I had left to stay in Australia:

And there was still a week left in 1988. I was heavily in dept. By the time I gave up the tofu business I owed more than fifty-thousand dollars.  I did not have money to purchase food or pay the rent and so my next stop after becoming imprisoned for three more years in Australia was the social security office. I filled out the forms for a sole-parent-pension that would at least help me for the next couple of weeks until I found a job and I was able to pay my own way. Losing my business and being without an earned income seemed like a cruel joke on my life and now I was on welfare. I made a pact with myself that I would be on the sole parent pension for three months at the most. Just long enough to get settled into a new job. There seemed to be no jobs in Port Elliot, Goowla, Middleton, Mount Compass or Victor Harbor but I knew something would come my way.


“my mission”
There had to be some reason why the cosmos had forced me to live in Australia until the end of 1991 or the beginning of 1992. After all I was a Self-realized being – one of the elite or elect or some such caper. It was obvious that I was so cosmically superior to the rest of what was passed off as human in Australia that something great would happen. I was probably sent there to lead these foolish losers into the new age.


A bigger concern than “my mission” was that I did not have a car anymore and we lived out in the country where there was no public transport.


I did not know how I would do it but after my already terrible day, which saw me drop the children off at the grandparents, declare bankruptcy and signing on to welfare I had to get more help. I took a bus back to the grandparents who hated me at the best of times, explained my situation, and asked if they could buy me a car. I said I would pay them back within several months after I saved up money from whatever job I would be getting. It was the hardest thing I had done in my life asking these people who despised me for money. The grandmother told me I was no good and of course, my business failed because I was stupid. However, I did have one bargaining tool, one controlling device, and they had learnt over the years what it was. I had control of the children, and they were constantly asking to see Sacha and Leigh. I explained to them that without a car we would seldom be able to come into Adelaide and that the Family Court had awarded me custody and that is the way it was. They also wanted Sacha baptized in their Ukrainian Orthodox trip now that he was seven. Of course, the problem was we were stuck out in the boondocks. They offered to buy a car if Sacha did the baptismal shuffle. I took a bus to Port Elliot and a few days later, I took a bus back to Adelaide. Our sleazy trade of Sacha’s soul for a car was due to be a signed deal.


After learning his catechism verses Sacha was carted off to the Ukrainian Hall in Hindmarsh where he did whatever the Orthodox people do to a child. I bought a large Ford that was a bit worse for wear, but it worked and we went back to Port Elliot in our car with a baptized child surrounded by invisible Orthodox saints blessing us every kilometer of the way. We were the proud owners of a junky old car, a big Ford that was about ten years old with a lot of rust but we were thankful for having our own transportation again. The content of my tofu factory was sold at auction. When all the dust settled, following the auction and selling off my factory equipment I still owed more than $40,000. I realised how poorly I kept records at the end of it all.  I thought I was only about ten thousand dollars behind.


My dreams of becoming the tofu king of Australia had finally ended. It had begun in Honolulu and had survived a divorce, seven production places99F and seven and a half years of having a place in Australian society. Another cycle of Saturn. Four and a half of those years I shoved it into the face of Australian society on my own. During that time the children had been in three schools and six homes including the tofu factory in which we lived for a month in Adelaide and their mother’s house. During those years I had been back to the States twice and I had developed some good products. Fifteen years later I am still making several of my products though only for my own family and I make a tofu cheesecake for my last classes of the semester at the State University of New York at Albany.


I pretend that life is about lessons, and I learn them so I will never have to repeat them again. For example, I learnt my lesson about getting married and especially getting married to an Australian; actually, I learnt that lesson for close to two decades before forgetting about my learnt lesson and my pledge, never again. Though I am happy I did do that one again. And I also realised that, finally, I had learnt my lesson on going overboard with anything again. It seems that I just leap into projects and go manic, thrash about for a while and just before drowning I manage to pull myself upon some strange and foreign shore and swear that once I get settled, I will never do anything that is over the top again. I think it is because I have Jupiter in my first house and it is square to my Sun, Saturn/Pluto conjunction, and Venus in a wide opposition to my Moon. Fair enough I have big ideas, gargantuan plans that take on heroic and otherworldly expression, but they look so doable at the time and in light of the tempting illusionary lore of a drunken magical musical muses incantational chanting “You can do it” I never hesitate for a moment before taking the charge into the unknown darkened and murky water of experience. Each time believing that this is the right thing to do.


I do not know whether it is an astrological misfortune of some wrongly lived life in another time that I am forced to act out in some hit or miss fashion with the hoped for result of paying off my bad karma or whether I took too much LSD in the past and my brain chemistry wiring is all corroded and bent out of shape or maybe there is a God who fills my consciousness with “go for it mate  you can do it” subliminal suggestions; just for a laugh.


Maybe there are a bunch of Gods. One for each galaxy and lesser ones for each solar system and the God of our Solar System is in competition with the Gods of some other local star systems in our particular corner of our particularly small galaxy to see which one of them can produce the most fucked up creatures. If there are 7,000 individual stars along the center of the North Galactic Pole and each star is a God and most Gods are bigger than the God/Star of our solar system then it is easy to see why our God is trying so hard to beat the other Gods in the Most Fucked Up Creatures competition that they are so heatedly involved in. Our God has “small cock” syndrome. Just to show how right I am I just looked on the Internet (and we know that the answers there are always correct)

Damn And I thought I had my head in the clouds.

 

The grandparent’s house, an ex-chicken takeaway, the place with the bones being cooked in the back, our own built factory in Hindmarsh, Meadows and Myponga ex-cheese factories and our farm in Mount Compass.

 

15 . Scary encounter with the ex

About Terrell Neuage
PhD

Terrell Neuage at Kerala beach, February 2025

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 77.