The Hound

Non-Fiction
Location - Melbourne, Victoria
Written - November 2005
[I wrote this one about a mate of mine. He was flattered at the time, these days he tells me I can do better.]


The Hound sings like Tom Waits, and plays harmonica like No Man. He dresses in leather for smoky bars, with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. You may find him at the open mike, howling words of fire with his eyes closed. I think he wants his voice to be rusty; he wrenches it through the cigarette-strained chords of his throat with a deliberate imprecision. He sings the blues, plays the keyboard, or slide guitar with crooked hands. That’s when he looks at peace.

I don’t see him all that often. The last I heard he’s moved into a new house across the road from Chopper Read. I think The Hound would have a few stories to tell him. The man is always creating something. He seems to understand that even conversation is an art - you get the sense that his quips are improvised Blues lyrics that he just happens to be speaking. There’s a beat to him, a rhythm to his language and movements. I don’t play as much guitar as I used to, but being around him makes me want to pick up a guitar and start jamming to that beat. The Hound is a beat. The only thing about him that isn’t rhythmic is the monotone hum of his wheelchair.

I met The Hound through my brother, who’d met him at a pub somewhere. He’d seen The Hound’s swaying gait, as if forever on the precipice of some shattering fall, with hands that cannot quite grip to the edge of the bar, and assumed he was cataclysmically drunk. My brother drank twice as fast to keep up, only to later learn that The Hound has mild cerebral palsy. He said to him, ‘sorry man, I thought you were just drunk.’ The Hound smiled, and said ‘I was.’

The first time I met him I made awkward small talk. He was dressed up in black leather and dark sunglasses. I didn’t know what to make of him. As much as you’d like to believe that a wheelchair would not change your impressions of a person, it can become a ball of cotton wool around your conversation. I cautiously observed, ‘you’ve got the Bob Dylan glasses going.’ He replied, ‘no, these are Hound glasses.’

He can be an irritating bastard at times. The personality quirks, the moments of pushiness, the control-freak streak, the wisps of self-righteousness. The unsettling complexity. Yet it’s all a part of a uniquely twisted whole, which cannot help but seduce you with the love a mother reserves for her most difficult of children. There is just enough tension between The Hound and I to keep things interesting, as at times he can seem to disagree with everyone on just about everything, and puts a twist on it all with his acerbic sense of humor.

The man is a contradiction. A twenty-first century blues man. One time he brought an ounce bag of weed around, but he can’t roll joints for himself, so we started a production line of joint manufacture for him. The Hound insisted he had a philosophy essay to write, and asked us to roll him a few before he got down to work. The Hound has a unique taste when it comes to joints. To say he likes them strong would be to misunderstand. My brother rolled up what he described as a ‘Planet-Killer.’ The Hound wrapped his lips around it like a connoisseur of fine wine, drew, and commented, ‘a bit heavy on the tobacco, isn’t it?’

There was no university work done on that eve. We moved into a night with the texture of a dream. My brother and I on foot, The Hound in his wheelchair, and the traffic swimming past us on Nicholson Street. The Hound set his chair to full speed and wore a demented grin as my brother and I careened backwards in front of him, screaming as if he was some random stranger attempting to run us down, waving our hands around in a desperate plea for help from the general public. We stopped in the parklands to burst into a spontaneous and guttural hymn, booming out a single syllable in ominous chords. A pagan ode to the night. Myself on bass, my brother on the middies and The Hound on treble. We harmonized for a monistic chant in downtown Melbourne. We were going for ten minutes or more before we snapped out of it and spotted a pair of commuters at a nearby tram stop gaping at us as if we were mad. We laughed so hard that we couldn’t go on, and went home.

People admire The Hound. I think they respond instinctively to his spirit. And yet they don’t always know how to deal with it. He inspires a faux-pity that he doesn’t need. People want to surround him in cotton wool. And so he plays up to it.

One time he was in Myer, zooming about in his wheelchair, and entered a lift with an older lady dressed up in jewels and fur, strutting around with an expression on her face as if she’d just noticed dogshit on her shoe. She giggled nervously as he screeched into the elevator. She threw him a bone in all her benevolence, gesturing to his wheelchair to say with an awkward smile, ‘why, you could really hurt someone with that thing.’ The Hound looked at her and dead-panned, ‘you oughta see my knife lady. It’d slit you up a treat.’

Bouncers often try to turn him away from pubs because they think he’s drunk. And then, when he is, he staggers around inside drawling to strangers: ‘I just took ten pills,’ or ‘I found a syringe in the gutter, stuck it in my arm, and ended up like this.’ One time his electric wheelchair was stolen from the front of the pub as he left it outside. The next day went to the police station to place a police report wearing a T-shirt he’d made especially for the occasion that read, ‘Parole Is Fer Poofs.’ People don’t know what to make of him. Sometimes I wonder if he knows what to make of himself.

I remember a party that I went to but wasn’t in the mood. I sat out the back, smoking cigarettes, feeling the darkness strangle up my mind. The Hound came and sat with me. I told him I was scared that I drink too much. He sat with me for a couple of hours and we talked it through. I suppose sometimes you laugh at the lifestyle, sometimes you cry. We both drink too much. The only difference is that when I walk home I sway from side to side along the street on my feet, he sways from side to side in his electric wheelchair, his fuzzy hair pushed back on his head from the wind.

Once you get to know him, tales of The Hound take on a mixed air. One time he arrived home from a long night out, he’d been drinking with a punk who’d shaved The Hound’s head into a Mohawk, and dyed it bright red. The Hound staggered inside to search for food, and managed to prepare himself a bowl of soup. He lifted the bowl to his lips, stumbled, and the hot soup slipped from his grasp to splatter his face, scalding him. He collapsed on the floor shortly after grabbing the first cold thing he could find from the freezer. His flatmate found him in the morning, passed out on the kitchen floor with his new Mohawk, surrounded by carnage, his face bubbled with burns and a packet of frozen bacon on his forehead.

We laugh at the things that torment us. His mother died around the same time I broke up with my ex-girlfriend. I was in the depths of grief, and the relativity of The Hound’s situation made me feel guilty about my own sadness. We were two sorry-assed bastards for a while. We played a lot of music at my brother’s flat, in Carlton. I remember sitting with him on the edge of an oval, talking. He said his last girlfriend cheated on him with ‘all of his friends.’ He hasn’t been with anyone for a while. He said that girls don’t take him seriously. They pat him on the head, and flirt with him, and consider him Safe. I guess they figure a man in a wheelchair won’t want to make love. Won’t be much like any other bloke.

I guess love doesn’t always come for free.

The Hound attracts a mythology. He is a party enigma, a drunken angel. People remember their encounters with him, and the tales of his life so easily become legend. People latch onto the guy, and drain him for a vision of themselves. But I think the truth is always more simple than that.

I like it best when we’re playing music. Then we don’t need any defenses. Our cigarettes burn to a stub in the ashtray, and the beer remains in the bottle for the time being. We don’t have to use our legs. All mythology is gone. There is only an acoustic guitar, an old harmonica full of spit, and we sing the blues until dawn.