Concerned a bit about success and the extent to which it wasn’t hitting him full on, a man in a gray cap that looked like it might have once been the color of the blue jumpsuit below it, past his face, moved from one barstool to another that was closer to the tap and therefore likely to get better service. The service he had been receiving on stool one was fine, as he hadn’t had an empty handle in front of him for more than a few minutes since he’d entered the bar three hours before, but I suppose his reasoning was sound enough: you can always do better.
I was there, just in from outside where it was still light, looking for my new friend from the hostel, whose name was Adam and who had spent the prior four years working at a butcher shop in Norway, and that was all I knew about him. Actually, that’s not true, I knew that he was from New Zealand originally, Whanganui in the North Island, and that he was planning on going to university in Christchurch in the fall. But that was all I knew about Adam.
Again I’m not telling the truth – that was all Adam had told me about himself. Here are other things I knew: he was slightly taller than me and much friendlier upon initial contact with a stranger, particularly one who shared an identifiable bond with him, be it age, as in our case, or nationality, as with virtually everyone else we met that night. Later Adam would relate this trait to me in terms of nationality: the Norwegians, he explained – and with an expansive gesture he included all Northern Europeans and perhaps all non-native New Zealanders– are not very friendly until you get to know them. I knew how they felt, or did in comparison to Adam.
Other things I knew about Adam: he had tightly cut hair and a tan he must have received in the three weeks between returning from Norway and making his way down to Stewart Island, whose one pub we were meeting at to get drunk and play pool and, in Adam’s case, to try to get invited to a party with some locals our age. I didn’t know about this last part, but wouldn’t have been surprised had it been related to me sometime after five minutes after I’d met Adam; it fit with the program you received upon entering the theater showing Adam’s show. I actually knew a lot about Adam after those five minutes – he didn’t hide parts of himself Norwegian-like for second and third look, for future exploration. Or at least that was my sense.
Adam told me, as if in confidence, he was pretty good at pool, and asked me if I was. I am not good at pool, in fact have only played it a couple of times, and told him so. (I am, incidentally, pretty good at tenpin bowling and am borderline savant at darts. Try me.) He told me that was ok, and indicated further that it was ok because he was, in fact, very good at pool and would be able to carry me, even if I proved to be complete dead weight. This last part was told through attitude, but it prompted me to repeat through words: I’m really bad at pool. I will be surprised if I sink a ball. This was the truth, I was not underselling myself. When I sunk a ball in our first match, I was, in fact, surprised.
I had arrived at Stewart Island at 10:30am on the first ferry over, through choppy seas that had ruffled my feathers a bit and had ripped them right off the woman a few rows ahead who spent the majority of the journey vomiting silently into paper bags. Every few minutes, the two ferry attendants – is that the right word for flight attendants on a ferry? – would come up, checking on her and replacing her bag, carrying the invariably full one back up the aisle to their trashcan behind the bar. The rest of us, minus me, looked on in amusement. Beside me sat a woman who had been sailing around the world for ten years – ten years! – with her husband. She told me this wasn’t so bad, that they wouldn’t sail the ferry if it the waves were really a problem, that they would in fact stop running the ferry even if the waves weren’t dangerously high just because it was no fun running a ferry full of vomiting tourists. Had we been in, say, South America – where she had been with her husband a few years back – we might need to be worried, because no such institutional safeguards would protect us. I was grateful for the woman’s conversation – it kept me from consciously fighting vomiting, and, more importantly, consciously fighting looking like I was trying not to vomit, for thirty minutes, and I was grateful when she, like virtually everyone else I had met in New Zealand, was jealous of my job as travel writer.
I had spent my time on Stewart Island researching the prices for tours, moped rentals, accommodations, and food. There were places I could go where I could blow cover in order to get the information I needed efficiently, and places I had to go under cover for fear of getting different, preferential service from the establishment. One of the researchers before me had a penchant for writing up isolated lodgings – isolated for the most isolated regions in New Zealand, you understand, where “isolated” is less an on-face adjective describing privacy and solitude and was more a euphemism for far the fuckety fuck away – I had, over the course of the afternoon, walked much farther than I’d expected to, researching a town of 350 people. Adam’s story was much cleaner: he had come to Stewart Island because it was the southernmost part of New Zealand, he had hitched down from Dunedin 150 or so kms north because he had never been to Stewart Island before, and thought he should check it out, and when he heard I was researching the island’s Great Walk decided he would come with, at least for a day or so. I told him I was toying with the idea of doing the 36km walk in a day, and he said really? He’d be down for that. He’d never really tramped before, but he was down for it, it was something he’d always wanted to do.
Let me make one thing perfectly clear: walking 36km in a day, walking a track that they estimate will take walkers 16 or 17 hours, in a day, is not possible, nor did I ever seriously entertain the possibility of doing it. For one thing, nobody had dared me to do it, as I had been dared twice to do the 31km Routeburn Track in a day. I still plan on doing that, and then phoning Tom Miller, a marathon runner and nice guy, one of the guys who dared me to do it, waiting for him to say hello, and then saying “in your face, bitch.” I’ll hang up then, for dramatic effect, and also because if Tom recognizes my voice the effect will be ruined, dramatic or not, as I’m not the kind of person who can pull off adding “bitch” to the end of my sentences. I’m too silly for casual misogyny, or it’s too silly for me. Some dumb slut told me that once, at least.
I waited about an hour before letting him know, without saying as much, that I couldn’t do it in a full day, as I had to take my time and research various claims we made about the track. He was down with doing it in two days, or maybe he would come out with me as far as Maori Beach and then head back. This was fine – I would appreciate the company.
Presently he got up and got us a jug of beer – I had purchased our starter handles. When he brought the jug back I was confused and tried to drink out of it – no no, he said, you use this to refill your handles. Oh. The jug was smaller than pitchers used in the states, and I was well indoctrinated with New Zealand’s fondness for drink – had in fact seen a man drinking outside the island’s pub for seven hours from 10:30am on as I had done my research, so I’d just assumed, wrongly. I was extremely gratified when it turned out Adam was, in fact, extremely bad a pool, extremely bad, as bad as me, and we lost all but one of the three games we played in the three hours, and won the one because the drunken locals we were playing scratched while attempting to sink the eight balls. In New Zealand, what Americans refer to as “solids” are referred to as “smalls.” I never learned what stripes were referred to; I was done researching for the day.
The man who I mentioned earlier, in the blue and the gray, had met up with some friends at the far end of the bar, and had proceeded to make enemies out of them, telling them to go fuck themselves as he moved to the other side of the bar to another group of locals he knew. I noticed that in fact, the gray hat he was wearing had probably once been the color blue of the jumpsuit, as they were both emblazoned with the same logo – the logo for Stewart Island Experience, which ran the ferry, most of the tours, the shuttle to the ferry from the closest actually habitable mainland city, and handled all moped and car rentals on the island. You could not avoid Stewart Island Experience while on Stewart Island, which I suppose explained and justified the name, although the company had been careful to disguise it’s ownership of some facets of intra-island travel by leaving the name of some of the companies they had bought out the same. I was reminded, the part of me that’s reflexively cynical and runs from my neck to my toes, of John Steinbeck’s The Pearl. This was a stupid thing to be reminded of – Stewart Island Experience was not going to cheat me out of my one shot at financial security, causing my baby to starve/be eaten by a wolf, which I think might happen in the Pearl. They were just going to overcharge me for a ferry home, and not overcharge me too much at that. Actually, it was possible the price was fair, I had no idea what the expenses were for running a boat across the Strait three times a day, let alone for all the paper vomit bags they must go through.
***
I would rather be eaten by a wolf than starve, icidentally, if any of you are planning a surprise for my birthday or something. A potential obituary, which you can forward to any news service you want should I be eaten by a wolf:
Local Poet-Philosopher Teethed to Death, Was As Delicious in Death as He Was In Life
Leaves behind four parents, such being the state of family in 21st century America, two sisters, a complete collection of Britney Spears CDs, and a bloody scraps of shirt and trouser. Will be missed by coffee-vendors throughout Cambridge, Ma, and also potentially by the ladies. Ah yes, the ladies; he knew several of them by name.
***
I asked Adam, who was sitting across from me looking alternatingly at the pool game being played a little way off and at the tennis match – Federer vs. Agassi – being played on the big screen above it, if hitching was hard in New Zealand; some people I had talked to earlier in my trip, and then again later, had told me that it was not as safe as it had once been. If this was true, it was not true in Adam’s experience, or, more accurately, he had no frame of reference with which to compare the present to the previous, safer state of hitchhiking. I lied earlier when I said I was done researching for the day – I just wasn’t researching pool, and was also getting pretty drunk on this, my fourth handle.
Handles are smaller than pints, I think, but not by much – it might be that they’re smaller than British pints, which are actually larger than American pints, so that handles are in fact exactly the size of American pints, after all. By this point I was pretty drunk, I can say with some confidence. We were both rooting/felt bad for Agassi, because this was pretty much his last season to have a legitimate shot at winning an open, and because Brooke Shields had broken him in two like a twig, but he lost in straight sets to Federer, was aced three times to start off the first set, and was never really in it.
