But the VW bottles in Zim’s cellar — they interested me. On the label was a lovely pale watercolour of your standard grape vines, but parked on a ridge in the distance, small as a lady beetle, was a pale red Bay Window Kombi van. The wine came from a vineyard in the Gold Coast hinterland.
I had seen this bottle before. On the night we’d come back to Zim’s place after our last ever monthly meal in Brisbane, and we’d knocked the tops off a few bottles of some of his ‘secret gems’, discovered over the years on tours of wineries and in various restaurants, then watched Field of Dreams together, both of us melancholy and weeping deep down inside with the memories of our fathers, he had shown me one of these Kombi bottles. He had produced it, excitedly, because there was a Kombi being driven by Kevin Costner in the movie, and he popped on his spectacles and pointed to the little red Kombi on the ridge in the wine label.
‘Is it wine or motor oil, Zim?’ I asked.
‘It has been recommended to me by a very, very fine nose,’ said Zim.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘A man with an impeccable palate. A peerless nose for bouquet. A man born to be a winemaker, or at the very least a sommelier. It’s his little investment, in the hills behind the Gold Coast. It has been a well-kept secret in local wine circles. But soon everybody will know about it. It’s the best wine ever made in Queensland.’
‘So it was made last month, instead of last week?’
‘Trust me. They will shower it with medals.’
‘This nose of yours, what does he do for a real crust?’
‘He’s a very powerful developer—’
But I didn’t let Zim finish, because the movie was just getting to the part where James Earl Jones gets invited into the cornfield to see ‘the other side’, and I loved it when he went with the ghostly baseball players to find out what it was like in heaven.
‘Imagine it, Zim. Heaven,’ I said.
‘Yesssss,’ said Zim. ‘I should like to go there, just like James Earl Jones.’
Not long after that final get-together I like to think he did. Not a cornfield for Zim, but a vineyard. I also hoped Zim ate well in heaven, drank wonderful vintages that he’d only ever read about in books, and perhaps even met his hero, the pioneering gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, and exchanged notes on the meaning of wine in life, and good cheeses and the best desserts in history.
It wasn’t until I sat in the filthy office of Rufus T. Firefly, proprietor of the Marx Brothers Auto Shoppe, that I saw a bottle of that Kombi wine once again, on an otherwise bare shelf behind his office desk, standing in between what appeared to be a knuckleduster and a small pile of naked lady cigarette lighters.
And if I squinted hard, I could see the tiny red Kombi parked on the ridge, a clot on my future.
~ * ~
5
You may not have noticed, but at the moment there’s a lot of money to be made in nostalgia. Why? I’m no sociologist, but I have a theory. The world has lost its regard for the past. We don’t treasure it. We don’t warm our feet by it. We don’t treat it with respect. Today there is no past.
Poppycock, you say. (Now that’s a word from the past.) But at the risk of sounding like a winsome old geezer repeating the generational adage that the past was always rosier, that its water was sweeter, and its values strong and true, I’m going to lay it down for you. The fact is the current generation has no affection for the past, has no understanding of it, because they don’t know what it is. How can you blame them? Their lives are predicated on an exact moment in present time. Life to them is what they see on a computer screen — itself an illusion, for what is a computer screen and that which appears on it but a pixellated, illuminated nothingness? What is the World Wide Web but a connecting tissue of lights and sounds, a ‘thing’ that has no feet in the actual world except for the cord that connects it to an electrical socket? Tell me what happens when the power goes off, then the computer battery dies? Poof. All gone. The show’s over.
The youngsters have their mobile phones, too. Oh, do they have their phones. All these words and images streaking from tower to tower across the world, finding their targets, all creating an unending and dreary ‘present’, the great language of Shakespeare abbreviated to the point of incomprehension, the slander and slang, the blips and beeps of a whole slab of youthful humanity with no thoughts beyond the moments of their connectivity. Once upon a time we got excited by a letter turning up in the postbox. Once, we collected stamps. How quaint it all seems now. Today, kids get hundreds of letters a day on their phones. When life speeds up, some very human joys are lost forever.
Moan on, old man, I hear you say. But to eliminate the past. Well, there are enough cliches on that endeavour that don’t need to be repeated by me. Yet I can’t help but feel we have left behind some of the crucial essences of what it is to be human — to communicate via speech and ear, to look at the world with our own eyes, to anticipate, to genuinely feel. For some of us, nostalgia is a path back to that state. A return to being sentient.
Thus my yearning for a Kombi. And thus my uncomfortable meeting with Mr Firefly at the Marx Brothers Kombi Auto Shoppe. I loathed him on sight, as I’ve said. I knew from years of experience he was a bad man, permanently disconnected from human decency. I resented that I had to go through his repulsive self to get to my dream. I had no doubt, too, that this place of business was a good, old-fashioned chop shop, and not the edible kind but the recycled-vehicle variety. Cars were being stolen and reborn here. Parts taken off legitimate vehicles and screwed onto illegitimate ones. It was an unending puzzle of truth and lies. Places like this, and people like Firefly, if that was his real name, leached off people’s dreams. Sucked the marrow out of their ambitions. He was nothing but a bottom feeder, and a waste of good oxygen. Outside of prison, the community paid for having grubs like this in its presence. Inside prison, they paid as well. There was always a levy for men like Firefly.
There was only one way to deal with him. You had to let him at least sense you might be prepared to get down on his scabrous level of humanity.
‘That bus you looking at, she’s ten grand cash, money up front and you drive away,’ he said.
‘I haven’t even seen it yet.’
‘Got a lot of people interested. Gonna be gone in a flash. Take it or leave it.’
‘I would have thought the purchaser could at least get the vehicle checked over by professionals, the motor, the—’
‘Take it or leave it. You’re wastin’ my time.’
In the bright neon of his office I could see some badly hand-drawn, do-it-yourself prison tattoos on his forearms.
‘How long you been in the Kombi game?’
‘None of your freakin’ business. What are ya, a cop?’ His face hardened, which was saying something, as it was already cold and granite-like and pitted with the ghost of some teenage acne before it changed.
‘Don’t be rude, Rufus. I’m just trying to establish your antecedents.’
‘What’d you call me?’