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A Letter from Fat Norm

"Thanks Doc" I said (relieved but lousy) and called a cab.

Two draws on your rarewood emerald studded hash pipe later dear reader I was lying in a yellow metal bed in a room full of nuts, with the paint peeling off the walls Bars on the windows, white coats, exquisite view of the roof of the maternity ward and seven other patients cracking the nuts and feeling lousier than a louse at a lice convention. Napoleon in one bed, Rasputin in another — the bare in the bog are for your own good brother. But at this point the long biro of coincidence came in. On a table in the middle of the ward was a stack of a brightly coloured periodical. I took one. One glance at one page fucked my tiny mind into fragments of carmic seminal fluid. I saw the full running and ingenuity of modern psychiatric medicine in a trice. (A trice being a state of perception one stage less Jerry Rubin and or James Wattie/Baxter influence than a thrice).

But I digress - The page was entirely covered with what I can only render tamely with the phrase "where it was all at".

To the eye of the sane it claimed to advertise products, products pharme-ceutical, products which you buy clad in pharme suit.

To the eye of the maniac, which was myself, it offered love, friendship and beauty beggaring description. Buy a tube of pimple cream and be desired. Send for a deodorant and marry money. Purchase a toothpaste and the entire population of Wellington will clamour frantically pleading suck your balls.

I read on. Five minutes a day would make me muscular, a karate pamphlete would enable me to kick sand in peoples faces on the beach. No scales or boxing exercises would give Hendrix a successor and a simple course in accountancy would see Muldoon tearfully playing a fiddle outside the hive. I screamed to the warder for scissor, stamps and ink. I tore my pyjamas from my shrivelled body and fled from the hospital. I took a cab home.

Today you see me mister universe, popular and in demand at parties and socials, clear of eye and sweet of breath. Thanks to my courses in engineering, business management and cartoon drawing I now own the North island and a semidetached villa in Karori. I could dance Fred Astaire under the rug, deal with twenty Hells Angels armed with anti tank guns bare handed and have in only three weeks given up the hazzardous and costly habit of cigarette smoking. Modern medicine is a blessing for which we should all be thankful, I moved and dropped off my ex miss world mistress and drove the Rolls into the garage. Modern mediciene is a boon to mankind I thought climbing into my pit (first brushing my swim in it shower in it sleep in it shoulder length blond dentures).

But Jesus would you believe it.

I woke up this morning, never, ever in my odourless, colourless, greaseless life having felt so fucking horribly indescriptably God awful lousy.

I am very sorry to see that, in the many speeches you are making around the country, you are, as usual, shamelessly stealing Labour Party policy. It is one thing to attack the Communist Party, talk is easy. What about action? Surely all your files on the Red menace carefully secured in the Treasury vaults have reminded you that it was a Labour Government which outlawed the Communist Party on the one and only occasion in New Zealand when the full extent of the Red threat to our security, freedom and dividends was fully understood? Our anti-communist record is the best in the country, while we all know that the insidious pressures of foreign cosmopolitan, including Jewish, capital which you have allowed to penetrate the economic defences of this country only help communism.

Let's look at the record. Before the last Vietnam mobilisation, immediately before your Government surrendered cravenly to the seething Red hordes of Asia by announcing an abject military withdrawal from Vietnam, I denounced the mobilisation and the long-haired louts who support it at Victoria University. Where did you stand? When the SpringboK Rugby tour of Australia was disrupted by a tiny group of agitators, professional students and hooligans, I denounced these people for their callous disregard for the aborignines. Where did you stand? When the watersiders went on strike, I denounced the use of the strike weapon. You equivocated.

Look again at the record. Jonathan Hunt was a militant student leader once. Now he is much quieter. Eddie Isbey was once a militant unionist. Now he gives talks about how workers and employers should love each other. Its amazing how becoming a Labour MP leads to a total transformation of the personality. All these people were once radicals; they believed in Big Norm, signed a loyalty declaration, and their lives were changed. It can happen to you, too, Rob. Big Norm is the last and stoutest bastion against Communism in this little country of ours. It may sound incredible. But, all you have to do is have faith in Norm, and suddenly you will see things so much differently. You can't work miracles like that in the National Party.

You may think you're really pushing it trying to run Jack Marshall out of the National Party because he's Tom Skinner's big buddy. But the way I'm going to purge the Labour Party will leave you for dead. Some way-out lefties in one of my Wellington braches wanted to invite a speaker from - would you believe? - the socialist Unity Party to a recent Labour Party Seminar. I soon put a stop to that. The only argument a Communist understands is a machine gun to coin a phrase. Then one Party member had the nerve to object to what I did. Then I startled the pinkoes into a real Pavlovian trance. "The Constitution and executive decisions over the years precludes any of the Party working in association with members of thy Communist Party". That's what I told them. It's all on file in a letter dated September 3. You can see what this means, can't you Rob? It takes one great man to understand another. Yes, all I have to do now is is revive the parts of the Party constitution everyone's forgotten about - especially the clauses passed back in the days when the Communists could be arrested on sight - and I can kick Brian Brookes right out of the Party. It was good of you to draw him to my attention but I've had my eye on him for some time. He almost got nominated as our candidate for Christchurch Central in 1969 but I soon stopped that. Leave it all to me, Big Rob. You've kicked him out of industrial mediation, I'll kick him out of the Labour Party. After all, that's what politics is about: anything you can do I can do better. Have you anything on Noms Collins in those files of yours?. All these industrial mediators have to work with Comms anyway. So they shouldn't be in the party.

Then there are all these fellow-travelling MP's who go in all these anti-Vietnam demos organised by the Corns. Phil Amos has been seen on a demo and talked to Tim Shadbolt in bare feet. I believe my Public Relations Office not only marched on a demo but spoke a sentence or two to Rona Bailey. They'll be out on their necks. Even Trevor Young marched in Lower Hull - well, it was getting a bore buying a special bottle of lemonade for him at every housie evening.

There'll be nothing like it since the Night of Long Knives. One thing you can say about. Labour MP's though. When you start a purge. Jack Marshall, has the incredible nerve to fight back. But as everyone in the Labour Party knows that if the rules were strictly enforced almost anyone could be expelled at any time, nobody fights back when I start giving orders. Look at Phil Amos, after all. Let's face it. Some Labour MP's are association with Communists. Either we expel them - or we flout the Party's constitution. I believe in the rule of the law, Rob. It is expedient that one man - if necessary more - should die politically for the good of the country.

P.S. A little bird tells me you've heard that the Communist Party stood down their candidate in Lyttelton in 1963 to allow me a free run for the seat. But you wouldn't attack me for something like that, would you, Rob? Not everybody whom the Communist has worked with is really a Communist themself, you know. If it were generally known that the Communist Party had helped me to win Lyttelton, I might even be expelled from the Labour Party on the basis of the rules I'm ramming down the Party's throat. And, then, I didn't have anything to do with the Communist Party standing down its candidate. They just decided off their own bat I was a nice man. After all, I am a nice man. Can you blame even Communists for thinking so? It's one of the few good things about them. I might have told someone on the Trades Council to stop a Communist candidate standing, but I didn't approach them myself. Somebody else did all the work. Try the Red Smear on me and you'll get everything that's coming to you. And in any case.

That's one thing they can't say about the Labour Party - or not unless you go back to the nineteen forties. Yes, I know Warren Freer was on the Peace Council once. He'll be axed along with eyeryone else - N.