Pictures Of Makis

Don Mitchell commemorates his Bougainvillean friend in this touching post over at TheNervousBreakdown.com. -Erika Rae, Irresponsible Editor

In the white shimmering overexposed one he’s looking through his chrome camera at Niagara Falls in late December. This was before black cameras were the common things they are now, so the only black in the print is Makis’ face, though little of it shows above the fur collar and below the knit hat. It’s 1978.

In another he’s holding what we christened the world’s largest chicken, a stupendous fowl as big as a small turkey. He cradles it in the crook of his arm as if it were a baby. We couldn’t decide whether to boil it village fashion or to roast it whiteman style. In the end we roasted it because we had neither bush spinach nor coconut milk, and anyway, what’s the point of bogus village cooking?

But the one I’ve got on my wall, the one I brought down from the attic in 1996 when I heard he’d been murdered – that’s the one I like best. Christmas Day. He’s holding the Elvis calendar I gave him. I want you, I need you, I love you, it says along the top, above the picture of Elvis in a cowboy hat.

“This is a good one,” he said in real life. In the picture he says nothing. He’s just sitting on my Beluchistan rug, in front of my Japanese wedding chest, bottom of the Christmas tree at the top of the frame, wrapping paper spread around him. There’s a big can of Foster’s Lager, still in red tissue paper, which I got to make him feel at home. I couldn’t get any South Pacific Lager. Solomon Islands, Beluchistan, Japan, Christian holiday, Australian beer, and old Elvis, wreathing them all.

It took me a while to find those pictures. I keep my past in the attic, even though it ought to be in the basement. That would be more appropriate for a prehistorian: the past below, the future above.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE at TheNervousBreakdown.com.

Posted by erae on Sep 8th, 2009 and filed under Nonfiction, The Nervous Breakdown. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response by filling following comment form or trackback to this entry from your site

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