Tuesday 24th May, 2005
Keeping in mind Eddy Fletcher’s request that I produce Sept colour issue of BENZSCENE, I called on Stylex and spent half-hour with Mark Jones, who told me colour fix for commercial printing must be formatted CMYK. I discovered my copy of Photoshop Elements is unable to do this conversion.
So it’s possible there will be no colour issue of the magazine.
It’s a tight noisy space below street level in a dusty central city building, rows of men sweating to get the job done on time, trying not to burn their fingers on the hot metal as they rearrange the fragile cases into position. They are meticulous in what they do, even if the end product of all their work is only briefly taken note of before going up in flames. Well, that’s how I would imagine it anyway.
Pat Hathcock is a former linotypist. He says of his nomadic days in the newspaper industry, “They travel from town to town. They drink hard, they work hard, and they are dedicated to their craft. They’re typesetters.”† I think my late grandfather was always on the move, consciously or unconsciously. He definitely loved to travel; he took me and my grandmother on a day trip to Auckland airport once. Most of that somewhat blunt description of the daily printing grind could be applied to Grandpa—bar the drinking; although talk to sweetheart hopefuls Harriet and Dorris from his former rest home and they’ll tell you, somewhat to their surprise, that he even loved that … and fly fishing. Had they turned up at the same leafy Albany funeral home a day earlier, they would have found out even more.
Grandparents, unlike parents, really get to fill that role of knowledge giver. Sure parents do it too, but it’s generally hastier and peppered with the messier task of parenting. This was a role which my grandfather filled with relish. He couldn’t wait to get started. Childhood, I got the impression, was for him something of an untidy stage on the way to “Career”. I’m sure when I was all of seven he would have been more comfortable helping me prepare my CV than going through the performance of rescuing the bright red cart yet again from its tight grip in the garage roof. This much-treasured play thing that Grandpa had created with his bare hands propelled us through many a lazy pre-adolescent afternoon.
Even the arrival of the token Americanism embodied in McDonald’s confident golden arches couldn’t convince you that Feilding was anything other than the sleepy backwater it had always been. ‘Friendly Feilding’ it calls itself, population 14,000, most of whom resented the arrival of Hotcakes and Chicken McNuggets, if they were anything like Grandpa who never failed to enjoy pointing out the small hamlet’s rupturing of the i-before-e rule. We grew up trying not to fall into the deep gutters of Denbigh Street, momentarily disturbing the almost rural tranquillity of our grandparents’ leafy quarter-acre paradise. A mosaic reading “Wharekoa” would greet you as the family car carefully followed the house-hugging concrete driveway. In later years it took all of my concentration not to re-paint the brickwork in bright red Honda Civic. I guess I spent a lot of my time driving bright red vehicles around that house. My memories of those days are very much in colour, even if the June 2005 issue of Benzscene wasn’t.
It was here, at number nine, that Grandpa spent many years playing Grandpa. He even had the requisite book-lined slightly musty den complete with mustard green clock and perpetually paper-iced rimu desk as he eagerly got his head around the latest technological twists and turns of text-shaping. Such a time consuming distraction was no doubt also handy when it came to hiding from Grandma. That den contained Grandpa’s world of details. And he would share them all with you if you cared to step inside. I worked on a university assignment there once. I felt very studious. It’s odd how true that cliché is that you don’t really know what someone means to you until they’re gone. But, like Grandpa, that den felt like it would be there forever.
I knew my grandfather as a highly ordered man whom I generally lived in fear of. I don’t think I ever entirely lost this feeling, even when he was on his deathbed. He had a deep sonorous voice that could just as easily turn from booming laughter to blood-stilling reprimand. He enjoyed Shakespeare. I was terrified when, driving myself to Feilding from the Kapiti Coast for the first time, I got lost and knew I’d well and truly missed the midday lunch performance. Fortunately Grandma was having even bigger dramas that day and my geographical ineptitude was forgiven. Later that same year, preparing to embark on a road trip with my cousin back to Auckland after spending our final Christmas at Denbigh Street I was duly informed of the appropriate course to navigate through New Zealand’s swirling asphalt. After sheepishly disclosing that the trip would contain a backtrack to Te Kuiti I thanked English discretion for there being no further details requested of me. Grandpa may have been exacting but he knew about making it up as you went along as well. He had after all whimsically jumped on a boat from England at the age of twenty-one. You could say he was a bit of a nomad. Feilding was a slightly incongruous fit for such a man of the world. He couldn’t wait to leave there and find his way amongst the bustling scenery of downtown Auckland. There was always more to know.
He was still recounting the intricacies of Linotype to us on his deathbed. I’m still not sure I totally get it. You really had to have questions prepared where Grandpa was concerned. Not many of us go into Domino’s and ask for a personal inspection of the device that will be crisping our three cheese crispy crust. I imagine such requests are even less common over at Hell. But yes, were Grandpa preparing himself for cremation and should there have happened to be available a downloadable Adobe PDF exhaustive manual, he would have it screaming off of his printer. All 700 pages. Perhaps then I shouldn’t have been surprised that his funeral would be interactive, something of a cross between a solemn remembrance and an undertaker’s field trip.
“Would you like a tour of the crematorium?” An unusual phrase, offered up politely like a bag of peanuts, or a moist towel. Not precisely what I might have expected to have suggested to me following my grandfather’s funeral, although in our case it would seem the ever so helpful attendants were prepared to shepherd us through every detail of our dear grandfather’s final hours. It was as though beneath the appropriately sympathetic attitude lay a barely disguised desire to reveal the full form of the business in all of its blood-curdling brilliance. Like an over-zealous member of the flight crew who can’t resist letting you in on just how prepared she is for the “unlikely” event of your bone crushing plummet back to earth: “Goodness me, I mean the speed those engines run at you’ll be mincemeat in seconds. That is if you’re lucky enough to go that way. All depends on the trajectory really. And the unburnt jet fuel will irritate any severe injuries, but again all down to seating position. Where you are? Hmm … maybe shoulda forked out for first, but hey, highly unlikely. Peanuts?”
I don’t recall reading anything about this in the brochure, granted I never read the brochure, but had I had the pleasure I’m sure I would not have located this anywhere on the glossy pages of death incorporated. These people were not the Addams family, they were clearly doing death very well, and doing very well out of death if the overstuffed furniture and minibar were anything to go by. “Death” is one thing however; how we deal with the physical reality of it is quite another. Then there was the fact that my grandfather was never going to die. Yes he was old, as grandfathers should appropriately be, but even he never acknowledged that he would at some point depart the known universe. I’d talked about it with my nana and in her version it was all very lovely and restful; as I seem to recall it was going to involve departing through a sun-streaked hole in the clouds. Very picturesque. But not Grandpa. Yea, though I walk through the valley of extremely hot crematory pizza ovens.
The scene started out right; family gathered around the hearse in appropriate leafy park-like setting. Not unlike the farewelling friends and family gathered before the departure gates, thoughts of the potential hazards of what lies on the other side swim somewhere in the conscious mind but are ultimately obscured by the reassuring secureness of it all. This is what we do with people, isn’t it? Put them in lovely wooden boxes, strewn with roses and reminiscences. Grandpa also had a transistor radio with him so he wouldn’t miss the cricket. So yes we farewelled our loved one, on a flight path even Richard Branson has not yet chartered, but nonetheless secure in the knowledge that he had indeed departed.
And most people would be quite content to leave it there. However when the slightly unexpected call for family and friends to follow through the gate, as it were, came there seemed to be a general feeling that it would be impolite to turn it down even if it did have slight Tales from the Crypt undertones. I did nevertheless secretly hope that the live streaming feature had concluded its coverage for the day. Perhaps this part was better saved as a special feature on the DVD. I could just imagine Grandpa’s sister back in Shropshire coughing up her Bath Olivers. As it was, full of WASPy determination that this was still a perfectly legitimate part of the experience, we made our way behind the hearse like a bunch of groupies sneaking backstage.
Waiting quietly for the small gathering encroaching on his usually deathly silent scene, Crematory Worker One, fluro attired, launches into a breathless, sweaty explanation of his duties before pausing, evidently expecting questions. Somehow in my preparation for this occasion I’d neglected to plan a few inquiries for the men who would be roasting dear Grandpa. “Ah, so what temperature do these babies run at … exactly?” or perhaps “Do you need to turn him halfway through?” Suddenly that half empty packet of crumbed frozen fish fillets I was contemplating for dinner seemed less inviting … if that’s possible.
“We’re actually redoing this one, so you can see right inside,” he continues to effuse. I notice there are little glass panels in the doors. That was one window seat I wasn’t sure I wanted. There’s an odd mixture of decorum and rampant curiosity, like catching a furtive glance at your teacher’s breasts when she leaned over during story time on the mat. Of course the person who would probably have been most interested in it all was, well, unavailable for comment. My grandfather had a lot of respect for men who worked with their hands, and I don’t mean tapping away at a keyboard. Although he did a fair amount of that too.
I couldn’t recall attending a funeral before that warranted an R18 rating. The place wasn’t really what I would have expected though: a kind of dank lair-type place serviced by a lanky suggestively attractive university dropout who sweated in a grunge garage band when he wasn’t sweating by the ovens. Or was that an episode of Six Feet Under? Anyway, the atmosphere was decidedly unsexy. More like Hannibal Lecter’s hang-out. I had some questions alright—they just weren’t about the type of bricks used in the oven. Tidy though, yes. Even the renovations looked orderly. Perhaps they could consider holding future services in there.
Surprisingly my family got right into it. Well half of them anyway, the rest milling about like it was an unusually formally attired BBQ. Suddenly I felt I should be taking notes. Part of the explanation behind the renovations was, well, the usual reason behind renovations—they needed more space. Apparently the obesity epidemic was making itself felt in the business of body disposal. Gives the phrase “burning calories” a whole new meaning. And if you were concerned that anything improper or slightly dodgy might be going on with the remains of your loved one, fear not; Big Brother is watching. From Australia. Who knows what they made of this scene through their CCTV cameras.
“Well, I think perhaps we should be moving on now,” half smiles the slightly harried looking funeral attendant. You mean we don’t actually get to hit the button?
And so we garnished Grandpa with roses before sending him off for … well yes.
After the episode my reserved aunt decided she definitely wanted to be buried, what with that and having seen people fleeing the Hannah’s fire in Wellington. I felt where she was coming from. But I didn’t feel the same. It had the effect on me like one of those air crash documentaries where the Boeing 747 gets brought down because someone forgot to replace an infinitesimal screw on the hydraulic thingee in the lower section of the two-part tail during the last scheduled maintenance. I mean is it really anybody’s fault that Jim has five kids, one on the way and a genetic alcohol abuse issue? In the end that level of detail has not put me off flying. And neither did a tour of crematory wonderland put me off frying. Go down in an aircraft and you could manage both. Nonetheless, as I popped the leftover savouries in the oven that night dear Aunty was adamant her curtain call would involve less pyrotechnics. That is if it’s ultimately up to her. I hope it is. She’s a very well-planned person.
Grandpa’s death in detail may not have been particularly literary, although “the hole in the clouds in the sky” wasn’t really his style. Everything had its reason and its place, just like the Linotype machine. Even though it may sound like a dry topic Thomas Edison did refer to it as the Eighth Wonder of the World; and leave it to Grandpa to turn printmaking into a performance. He certainly kept us entertained up to the very last; had we applauded you’d half expect him to reappear for the encore. I still don’t really know where he’s gone, but for that half hour or so I was right back in that cosy den. Well, maybe not so cosy. But he was there, peering over our shoulders: This is how it works; matrices coming down the chute to be pressed by hot metal into the slug; bones and bricks. The business behind the show. It’s nice to think someone could still surprise you even after they’d gone. Although with Grandpa it was hard to believe it really was a surprise. I think he knew all along; he’d read it somewhere.
† John Hendel, “Celebrating Linotype, 125 Years Since Its Debut,” The Atlantic, published 20 May, 2011, accessed April 3, 2015.