Eddie Rex
A Radio Play
Eddie: I will turn on the television. The oracle of the global village has called from the dinner table, Mumsie, Popsy and myself.
Tim: The weather forecast has promised us clear
skies and cool breezes. A season of friendship and fair competition between
the world's greatest athletes. Yes, as the theme of these Summer Olympic
games, One World, One Dream. That is what we are tonight. The
sports teams are now entering the Olympic stadium.
After
years of colossal planning by the people of Beijing and China, China
is now the host of the twenty-ninth Summer Olympic games. One hundred
years ago China asked to host the Olympics. She tried again for the 2000
and 2004 Olympics. Today Beijing is no longer the forbidden city. She
is the most open and most shining city on every video screen on the planet.
Eddie: Years of grovelling, back stabbing, a pyramid of public debt for what? The forbidden city now slimely croaks at the pinnacle of our global toxic waste land.
Tim: The Olympic teams, their flags held high, are now marching through the stadium.
Joyce: The president of China is Chinese? I don't suppose it really matters these days.
Tim: After the march-past and circuit of the Olympic stadium, an archer from the Chinese team will shoot an arrow into the sky to ignite the Olympic flame. The flame is the symbol of life and the Olympic ideal. It will this evening light up Beijing city as a beacon to world peace.
Eddie: Beijing a twilight zone of lunatic dreams of international capital descending in a cloud.
Tim: Eddie, shut up. We have no place now for lame ducks.
Eddie: Tim, you bemuse me. The stewed jelly matter inside my head goes on playing unending variations of old movie plots. Are we being Woody Allan tonight? I will riposte while Mumsie and Popsy sit in blissful obliviousness between me on their settee. Tim, you are a wasteland, swelled up, Olympomania duck. Your global language is Orwell's duckspeak. You are Huey, Dewey or Louie grown up to be a clone of your neurotic, sticky beaked, solipsitic uncle Donald Duck. I limp in the wasteland but can swim and fly like the old ducks. They were wonders of design, garbage disposal units, recyclers. You fatten in the wasteland through your quack quacking.
Tim: Tanzania
Eddie: How well do you think Tanzania will do this Olympics, Popsy?
Larry: If Jesse Owens was here, he would trounce those bloody blacks.
Eddie: But he was black too.
Larry: That's right. But he was our black.
Tim: Eddie, I remember your father Larry Rex in my school encyclopedia of international sport.
Eddie: The Rexes are a pedigree of runners. I was never a long distance runner but I too had my instants of glory in the school sports field. No one could quite believe it, Eddie Rex the sprinter.
Tim: Who was the first Rex runner?
Eddie: The first Rex runner was Reuben. Forty years after his marathon, only the older generation remembered it. Seventy years after, everyone had forgotten. I alone recall because the sacred disease has this evening gifted me with necromantic powers.
Tim: When did Reuben run his Marathon?
Eddie: He ran it ten years after Pheidippides the Greek won the first Marathon.
Tim: The first Marathon gold winner was Spyridon, the Greek shepherd, in the 1896 Athens Olympics.
Eddie: Pheidippides is the national Marathon hero of Greece. He ran 240 kilometres from Athens to Sparta and back again. Athens was a hillbilly, dirt-poor town, but to Pheidippides she was the elixir of life. With Athens lost, Pheidippides was no better than the goats nibbling on the dirt track beneath his pounding, sandalled feet.
Eddie: As Pheidippides approached Sparta, the great God Pan spoke to him, promising Athens victory if she would make him an offering. Athens won the first Marathon and the offering was the heat-exhaustion death of Pheidippides. Spyridon was a wet dream of Coubertin and fellow traveller Classicists. A child of nature who defeated the European sporting elect. In 1936 at the Berlin Olympics, Spyridon presented the Fuhrer with the olive branch from the grove of Olympia, two ageing clowns glorified to the world's delight.
Tim: I am a sports commentator, 1896 is my Jurassic age. Tell me about Reuben's Marathon.
Eddie: Reuben's history in the Marathon makes Jesse Owens a cherub. At the first Marathon, Reuben fought on the side of the Persians. Reuben won his marathon when he imitated Pheidippides but he ran in the opposite direction.
Tim: Please bring transparency to your family history to this dullard sports commentator.
Eddie: Reuben served the King of Persia at Susa. When King Darios sent his elect soldiers to fight for him in Hellas, Reuben naturally went too. He had the singular bad luck to be concussed by the poet and tragedian Aeschylos at Marathon. Aeschylos claimed Reuben as a trophy of his victory. Reuben knew the King of Persia would one day dispatch a second army to Hellas to avenge the Persian defeat. So he resolved to plan his escape. He would imitate Pheidippides' great race. But first he would have to elude his ever-vigilant master. One evening in the middle of a piss-up of Aeschylos and his hoplite mates, Reuben spontaneously made the perfect scam.
Eddie: Aeschylos said to Reuben:
Aeschylos: Reuben, my helot, what name do you call your supreme God?
Reuben: We have but one God. We cannot pronounce His name because that would be reducing Him to an object.
Eddie: The boys from Attica fell over themselves with laughter at such queer barbarism.
Eddie: Then they became angry that a slave was defying them.
Eddie: They brought over the torture instruments. Aeschylos became alarmed their fun would damage his property. He spoke to Reuben quietly.
Aeschylos: Tell us his name translated into the Greek tongue.
Reuben: His name means in your language, I am that I am.
Eddie: Aeschylos' mates fell over laughing again and one chundered over a slave girl's head.
Eddie: But Aeschylos went pale. His private God had always been the wine-God Dionysios. Now those few words struck him at once with the force of centuries of revelation in the deserts. He rushed outside and stared all night at the moon and stars.
Eddie: Now he disowned all the Gods of Hellas as mere blocks of metal and stone before this singular revelation. The universe in all its evil genius lay inside his own troubled soul. He plied Reuben with question after question on his theology. Reuben would only answer if he was permitted, every Sabbath eve, to run three times around the walls of Athens. From a cheerful extrovert and sadist master, Aeschylos became a gloomy neurotic, preoccupied with good and evil and the meaning of existence. His family were worried and blamed a stray sophist known to be lurking in the district. Aeschylos' plays, once full of picturesque action and heroes soliloquising Make My Day, became gloomy, guilt-ridden oeuvres that depressed everyone. One night he dreamt that Zeos had sent his underlings, Power and Violence, to nail him to a rock and to pierce his side to atone for the sins of the world. He told Reuben, who now felt sorry for his master, about his dream. Reuben comforted Aeschylos on his couch.
Reuben: God would never do anything so criminal and absurd. That dream is the effect of eating of green figs.
Eddie: Aeschylos was greatly relieved, and years later wrote Prometheos Bound out of his problem with the figs. But eventually his gloom was more than Athens could bear. They awarded him first prize at the great Dionysian drama festival in order to send him packing to Sicily to terrify, with his gloom, the local Mafia. Aeschylos could tolerate no longer God's silence. He wandered alone into the Sicilian mountains, crying out:
Aeschylos: Oh I am that I am, if there is meaning to all this send me a sign.
Eddie: An eagle, thinking Aeschylos' bald head was a rock, dropped a tortoise upon it and smashed his skull.
Tim: You didn't answer my question. I have asked you about Reuben.
Eddie: When, as expected, the Persian army under King Xerxes invaded Hellas, the Athenians evacuated to Salamis. In the confusion, Reuben ran with the practised skill of the marathon runner into the arms of his former comrades in Thebes.
Eddie: Persia lost again but Reuben had his solitary victory when the following year he returned to his family in Jerusalem.
Eddie: Everyone had given him up for dead. Reuben left the Persian army, and in gratitude to Yahweh became a temple scribe in Jerusalem. He never forgot his education in Hellas. On the eve of every Sabbath, he ran three times around Jerusalem's walls. As he ran again the marathon, he chanted the same words while he had run around Athens.
Reuben: Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return there.
Eddie: Reuben had composed that prayer as an antidote
to the war-songs of the Athenian boys. Reuben became obsessed – What
meaning was there in life's agony, and was his life ultimately more sacred
than a worm's?
As a catharsis, as he ran he pondered over the form and meaning of his
former master's plays. From such exercises of spirit and body, he wrote The
Book of Job. The name Job, meaning in Hebrew the Depressant is
a play on Aeschylos' father's name, Euphorion. Reuben founded
a dynasty of marathon runners. A Reuben survived the fall of the second
temple by running to Galilee. As times became hotter, Reubens went on
running. With their prayer boxes swinging around their necks, chanting
through their long beards the holy books, they kept on running to Odessa,
across the Ural mountains, past Warsaw, across the Danube.
Eddie: In every place, people looked out of their windows and called out, "Here runs a Reuben, the cabal of the running Rabbis". In the nineteenth-century, a Reubenstein ran from revolutionary Paris and took steerage to London. He changed his name to Rex in honour of the English King. His great-great-grandson Larry Rex ran away as a deck-hand not only from London but was the first Reuben and Rex to run away from God. This made him run even faster. He finally took down roots in Invercargill.
Eddie: He took up a land job as a salesman of water-closets, married Joyce and had five sons. Joyce sensibly kept quiet about Larry's heritage and English relations. My four brothers are as blond and blue-eyed and covetous as a Viking berserking in the Arctic ocean. They carry their psychs under the trampling wheels of their second-hand B.M.W.s. I copped the smouldering soul of the Reubens, scorched and stroked by the desert sun.
Tim: As I recall, Larry won a name as a Marathon runner in Invercargill.
Eddie: He very nearly won a place in the New Zealand team at the 1948 London Olympics. But he was past his prime. He once said his only grudge against Hitler was he stopped him winning medals at the 1940 and 1944 Olympics. So in 1948, Larry and Joyce toured to London to watch the Olympic games. I was in double steerage. On the Rangahine, gestating in Mumsie's belly.
Joyce: Isn't Mrs Bush looking a picture? And look, sitting beside her is one of her lovely twinnies. Do you remember, Popsy, our very first Olympics?
Larry: 1948 London. Cold bleak bloody London. The world's biggest empire and you couldn't beg, borrow, or steal a bloody boiled egg in its capital.
Joyce: Oh Popsy don't be such a wet blanket. London was down on its luck. But to a colonial pigeon like me, just being in London was wonderful. We trod the same streets that Wordsworth walked on.
Larry: Hrrumph. Filth, bloody smog, bloody socialism. Hoity-toity tories, bloody minded unions.
Joyce: Of course Eddie, Popsy has his little problem about English blood. He can never forget your mumsie's family came over with William the Conqueror.
Larry: Hurrmph, your ancestors came over in chains from Ireland.
Joyce: Popsy, that's not true, you are insulting my respectable family.
Eddie: Was it your plan to conceive and birth me on the Rangahine?
Larry: It wasn't my idea.
Joyce: You were our little package from the ocean. I brought you home as proud as if I was bringing home Winston Churchill. You were a darling baby, always sweet tempered, never cried for long. Of all our children, you have changed the most. But your passage has been the hardest.
Larry: You couldn't get into Auckland without some low life immigration official accosting me. "Hey" he shouted, "that baby can't come in, it hasn't got any papers." I held you under my jumper and just kept on walking down the gangway until the clown left us.
Larry: Bloody bureaucrats.
Joyce: Dad, you shouldn't be so rude to people only doing their job.
Larry: Mum, half the world's mischief is done by people saying that, the other half is done by decent rogues. What we need now is to wet our whistles. Damn it, it's the weekend, why do the socialists think the weekend turns the country into the Sahara desert? If Jesus was here and did a miracle on your haemorrhoids, they would arrest him for opening on a Saturday. He, he, he.
Joyce: Don't make another vulgar spectacle of yourself. You aren't with your London relations now.
Larry: So you're on that still are you? My sister makes us their honoured guest in their home. Invites our London relations and the neighbours to meet her family from the colonies and tha's how you treat them. I am disgusted.
Joyce: It's not my fault, our relations on your side have minds that don't rise above the pumpkins on their allotments and their door-step knockers. I actually admire such people, know everything about something or nothing about anything, is my motto on life. That's why I have always admired King William the Conqueror. He knew in the world there are only aristocrats and peasants. I look outside my garden window, and I admire our pussy Thomas and my gnomes. That doesn't mean I think they are my equals.
Larry: Mum, you're blathering again. They brought us into their home …
Joyce: You yourself said, cousin Stella is a fat pig. Now I would be perfectly happy to show to my friends in Invercargill a photograph of Stella, as a relation of my husband.
Eddie: After 1948, what was your favourite tour to the Olympics?
Joyce: We will never forget a single moment of Tokyo.
Larry: When Peter Snell won the 1500 metres, I said to Mum, That man makes me feel good to be a man. We human-beings crawl through the great cauliflower of life, and one day out of the shit and dribble there beats, with its wings into the sky, a monarch butterfly.
Eddie: Popsy, I never knew you are a poet.
Joyce: Don't be silly Popsy, Peter Snell wasn't a butterfly, he was a New Zealander that we should all be proud of. What I most loved about Tokyo was the ordinary people. When I had that headache, no waving arms about like in Rome, "How are you feeling now, Mrs Rex. Would you like another aspirin."
Joyce: During the war, we thought the Japs weren't really human, more like rodents. But they are a delightful people and so efficient and considerate with everything. You know Popsy. When I saw their elderly folk, I said to myself they aren't really Asians, they are our wonderful Maori people, that the good Lord has blessed with sky-high I.Q.s. Oh, look, there is Eddie waving to us.
Eddie: We've all being missing you.
Joyce: Has everyone been good? We are hoping you haven't had any more of your attacks.
Eddie: I had a little one yesterday.
Joyce: Oh Eddie, what have you done to your hand?
Eddie: I put my hand through the bedroom window as I was convulsing. I am sorry about the damage to the window.
Joyce: Oh Eddie, that means nothing to us.
Larry: Come on Mum. Eddie is OK. That new medication will control his illness and give him a normal life. You know what the doctors said.
Joyce: I know Popsy, I know. But why did it have to happen to our Eddie? Oh Eddie, you are a big boy now, but I can still put my arms around you and give you a little smacking occasionally.
Eddie: Yes Mumsie.
Eddie: What was your worse Olympics? Oh Christ, I shouldn't have said that.
Larry: Bloody A-rabs.
Joyce: Popsy, watch your language, this is a public place.
Larry: Bloody A-rabs. For years whitey has been soft and allowed the wogs to ride rough-shod over him. Tha's the thanks. Bomb the bastards. I'm sorry Mum and Eddie. I know you always squash everything I say. But on that point no bloody cleverness is going to change my bloody opinion.
Eddie: Popsy, I don't agree with what those people did. But when I think how they have been abused by the world-
Larry: Bloody A-rabs. Eddie, you've been to University, unlike your old dad. You know what the Olympics have meant. I am not having some bloody wogs shitting over our two thousand year old kulcha. Guns and blood in the heart of the Olympic village. They weren't people. They were animals. I wouldn't insult animals. A cockroach is a decent fellow compared with those bloody …
Eddie: You'd say that wouldn't you, you horrible man. They are people like ourselves, they are better, a people of culture and you just want them killed because you can't bear to face them with what we have done to them.
Joyce: Eddie and Popsy. Be quiet both of you. I cried too. Popsy, you are raising Eddie's blood pressure. Eddie, don't be so rude to your father.
Larry: How dare you say that to me. What are you to say that? You are over twenty, and you can't keep the most mickey mouse job. When I was your age my boy, I had already travelled twice around the world, and I was up at five every morning to support you all.
Eddie: Sure Larry, the lavatory man. All the years at school, we were taunted with that.
Larry: If you weren't my son, I'd take my fists to you, my boy.
Joyce: Stop it both of you. Oh shit, he's having an attack. Is there a doctor about? I am terribly sorry our son is an epileptic.
Larry: I'm going. I'll be waiting in the men's, my natural habitat. There are some things I wouldn't wish on anyone, not even a bloody A-rab.
Eddie: Let's not talk about Munich. I remember Atlanta 1996 was your last Olympics tour. Was it a good swan-song?
Larry: He, he, he. Mum and me by then were hideous wrecks. Things the cat brought home.
Eddie: Oh Popsy, you both still had your marbles, you still have them.
Larry: When the good Lord calls on judgment day, two resurrected cadavers will terrify the angels. Mum had a turn in Atlanta and no medics would go near her. The American disease industry was terrified that if she died, we would sue them for millions. It took a black taxi-driver to see us to the public hospital. He, he, he, there was Mum sharing a ward with druggies, AIDS patients, weirdos, shot-up gang members. The junk of America. Was Mum put out? Not mighty Mum, he, he, he. I paid a visit the next morning. There wasn't a pin drop in the ward. There was Mum holding forth about the story of her life. A big black man, as old and ugly as the Mississippi, was nodding his head and saying like gravel, "Sure that's what I've always thought maam. Not enough discipline with them young people these days." He, he, he.
Joyce: Popsy, stop it. It wasn't nice. I spent my whole holiday in that ward. All the patients and the medics were very kind to their foreign visitor. I am not having you put down any of them.
Larry: For the first time Mum has to rub shoulders with the great unwashed and now she thinks they are all angels. He, he,he.
Eddie: What shocked me about those games was Atlanta spent over a quarter of a billion dollars just to build its Olympic stadium.
Larry: They had those spare dollars they could scrounge, son, so they spent it on that. That's how an economy works. That quarter of a billion dollars provides jobs, businesses, prosperity to the city. If they had spent the same money on a mountain of lavatory seats instead, there would have been the same result.
Eddie: You know Popsy, you're right.
Larry: Sales, son, taught me that. If all the economists sold lavatory seats, we wouldn't need wars, and unemployment. The moon is now shining over the sea. It is time, Eddie?
Eddie: Yes Popsy. Where is it?
Larry: It is under the settee.
Larry: Son. Your disease has given you a special place among our children. We have supported you through your life as we have not done for the other children. Now we are expecting the pay-back. You won't fail us?
Eddie: No Popsy and Mumsie. I have failed you all my life. This I promise I will not fail you.
Larry: Good boy.
Eddie: Popsy. I am sixty years old. Please at last, do not call me a boy.
Joyce: You are our mokai. Our special solace in our old age. Now we are all old people. I will go to the bathroom. Call me when it is my turn.
Larry: Fine equipment this says the old salesman. It operates on the same principle as a vacuum cleaner. "Share your end with a friend," the label should say. The good doctor Nitschke spared Mum and me from any embarrassment. He wrapped it up like he was wrapping up a condom packet. Now, pinion my arms behind my back with this cord and put the bag over my mouth and nose. Now, as the doctor said, I will thresh around. But there is no discomfort. Think son, of a fish threshing about out of the water. My nervous system will feel no more than that fish. That's the way the world works, my boy. I am just an old redundant water-closet replaced by the inclining compost bin. Doctor Crapper I dedicated my life to you, but the old Gods must give place to the new. Get on with it boy before I belt you. The bloody Government is not going to get my money so it can make profits out of the bloody disease industry. I have five sons, an army of grandchildren and great grandchildren to support. There are some things a son should not see about his popsy, as Noah said to Ham. Get on with it. Do you know why I had no daughters? All that broiling in the tub after my marathon practices. If I had made love to Mum with my frozen balls instead, I would of had daughters. Get on with it boy.
Eddie: Actually Popsy, I always feel desperately sorry for the fish.
Eddie: Popsy, Popsy. I love you.
Tim: Palestine.
Eddie: Mumsie!
Joyce: Oh Eddie, I forgot you never trust the advertisers. It was just like when Popsy and me and the vet. put old Thomas to sleep.
Eddie: Death is always difficult, Mumsie. You do not have to go along with it.
Joyce: No Eddie. I will not let down my sons. You are all going to be here tomorrow with the lawyer to settle the estate. How would they all feel? Very let down, that Mumsie has deprived them of their inheritance. Remember dear, your plan to go next year to Greece? No one deserves their O.E. more than you. You have waited for your entitlement for sixty years. Now that Popsy is a specimen, I will tell you our secret. One morning on the Rangahine, Popsy left you in your cot in rough seas when he was not supposed to. You were thrown out on to the floor. Oh Eddie, there was blood everywhere, we thought you were going to die. But the doctor assured us you would be all right. We were young people. In those days you believed everything the doctor said. But now we know more – both Popsy and me think your illness was the result of the blow to your head. Before you had your first fits when you were fourteen, you were such a brilliant child, a prodigy, there was nothing you could not do and excel in. Poor Popsy has been slowly dying all these years as he has watched your sickness.
Eddie: Mumsie, there is only one thing no book or thought could tell me at all.
Joyce: And what is that, son?
Eddie: I have never touched a woman.
Joyce: Let us first roll Popsy on the floor.
Joyce: Now I will lie here and remove my blouse and bras. These are just withered dugs but once you sucked soft young woman's breasts. Do it again, just this one time.
Eddie: I remember once when I was fourteen and having a bath. You came into the bathroom and could not find any soap. I took my soap out of the water and handed it to you and you blushed.
Joyce: Did I? There are some things between mothers and sons we only realise in our dreams. Let me put my arms around your poor diseased head.
Eddie: That evening after my bath, I saw you scream on the telephone
Joyce: Did you?
Eddie: You screamed and screamed. I ran away and then our neighbour rushed over and you were quiet. I was frightened and told Popsy. Popsy said, "That gives me the guts-ache. The apple-tree blossoms are neat eh?"
Joyce: That is my own little strategy. My five sons and Popsy were little boys frightened of the shadows. You all still are. They all come running over to Mumsie whenever they are frightened and I tell them always it is just a bad dream, and go back to sleep. Oh the strain of it. A lump in the breast here, a bankruptcy threat there, your illness. I trembled inside always. Once every seven years, I gave up all my Mumsie don't be afraid, and I screamed and screamed. Then I went back to being Mumsie again.
Eddie: I went to my bedroom after I told Popsy how you screamed. And I started to laugh, I couldn't stop and then I had my first fit. I have been laughing and having fits ever since.
Eddie: I was number two of my brothers. And then one day in our early middle-age everyone forgot that issue and I was banished to number five. No-one noticed that moment except me when the presents were delivered at Christmas.
Joyce: The last is sometimes first. There is the first born. There is the third brother, the one with special powers and magic. With my fourth son, what could I do but become a mother with a first born again. The fifth is my last born, my mokai in my old age.
Tim: And now the archer will fire the burning arrow into the sky. The Olympic flame has been ignited. The cauldron, high in the sky, is now burning a flame that will shine down upon Beijing city throughout the Beijing games.
Eddie: How the moon shines down upon my wickedness tonight, he, he, he.
Eddie: Sergeant Rangi, this is Eddie Rex. You ask me what is my game-plan tonight. I have euthanased Mumsie and Popsy. Their ends were merciful. Popsy is lying on the living room floor. Mumsie is lying on the settee, her mouth is stretched wide open and her blouse and bras are undone. The Summer Olympic opening ceremony is drawing to a close. I will stretch out the phone to the television so you can hear the national anthem.
Eddie: The president of China is delivering the final address of peace and goodwill to all human kind.
Eddie: Serge, you say you are coming over to see what has been going on. Last time you visited us, I had climbed on to the roof of Mumsie's and Popsy's house. I was a Babylonian high priest finding out meaning in the moon and stars. I would have jumped from the ziggurat when my fit was over. But you put your great wing over lame-duck Eddie and brought me down. I had looked upon the firmament and glimpsed eternity. In return for saving my life, I have a special gift for you, Serge. Popsy too had a special gift for his five sons. He kept it in the top kitchen drawer and thrashed us with it until we buried it in the garden. My special gift was also Popsy's and belongs in the top kitchen drawer. It will also consummate in a garden burial. It will be a merciful consummation for both of us.
Eddie: Naked I came from my mother's womb and naked I return there.
