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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Baxter: Not How, Man – but Why? Life among the Junkies

page 52

Baxter: Not How, Man – but Why? Life among the Junkies

(James K. Baxter, former Burns Fellow in Dunedin, has no plans for writing in the future . . . instead he has totally committed himself to helping drug addicts, writes Neil Illingworth from Auckland.)

James K. Baxter is a name to conjure with in cultural circles. An eminent poet, playwright, essayist and critic, he could spend his time giving poetry readings to women’s groups and being lionised at arty dinner parties. Or even as a cloistered pedant within the ivied walls. James K. Baxter (‘. . . the sense of having been pounded all over with a club by invisible adversaries is generally with me, and has been with me as long as I can remember . . .’) celebrated his forty-third birthday in Auckland recently. No cake, no telegrams . . . just a visit from his son and daughter and conversation with a group of friends. Some of them junkies.

He is living in a bare room in an old house somewhere in Auckland. He sleeps on a thin mattress on the floor and owns the clothes he stands up in, along with a spare towel and a crucifix on the wall. Sometimes he suffers from backache because of the hardness of the bed he has chosen to lie on.

Chosen. That is the key to his way of life. In March this year he suffered a crisis of identity. ‘I realised I was slowly dying in the comfort of my home, smoking cigars and watching the television,’ he told me. ‘I asked myself whether I wanted to die or to live. I decided to live.’ The decision took him three painful days followed by nine months of reorganisation. Then he walked out on his wife and family, carrying a duffel bag containing a change of clothes and a Bible in Maori. Walked out deliberately, calmly, into a life of poverty, which he describes as a freedom that opens the way to beauty.

He told me about it in a series of interviews. ‘I was dealing with my ego hangups; the feeling that my things were me. A man who is about to die sees that he has no need for possessions and in fact he has no need for them a long time before he realises this. All a man needs is food, shelter, clothing and company. And for me you can add an altar to that lot.’

Travelling, as he puts it, by spiritual radar, Baxter stayed for some days in a Trappist monastery. Then he went to the Wanganui River and lived close to a Maori community for a while before coming up to Auckland and working for a few bitter weeks as a labourer in the Chelsea sugar works. Only then did his radar find him the direction he was looking for . . . a life among the drug users and addicts of the Auckland underworld, speaking their argot, understanding their problems and offering help and understanding to any who want to break the habit and begin to make their own social pattern.

To those familiar with his poetry, it was perhaps an inevitable step. As the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand says, ‘he has a compassion for those wrecked upon the rocks of social convention – the drunks, the deviates and the rejects page 53 of a success-dominated society.’ His comment is – ‘After all, I belong to that scene; I am one of them myself.’ And it is not surprising in a man of his background; born into a closely knit Otago tribal family of a self-educated socialist-pacifist farmer father and a mother with an Oxford M.A. in Old French; a youth as a roistering drunk; salvation from the bottle through Alcoholics Anonymous; conversion to devout Catholicism at last; bringing the spiritual and intellectual discipline he sought.

But it has shocked people who know him; and more so those who merely know of him. I have heard him called a pathetic and tragic figure. A mini-Tim Leary. A would-be guru. He has been criticised in print for attending Mass at St Patrick’s in bare feet. With his long hair and grey-shot tawny beard, his shapeless Corso-reject clothes and old black parka, he could be the figure that enraged an Auckland columnist to write recently of ‘greaseballs who drift like scum down Queen Street’.

Baxter smiles at such criticism. ‘I do not give a damn about my public image. It is a useless thing, and people will have whatever image they want, anyway. And would it really matter if I decided to go to St Pat’s in a toga? It is the man inside the clothes that counts.’ And people who criticise him this way have missed the Baxter beneath the clothes, a man of deep humility, compassion, kindness and honesty with a detached and ironic concern for human tragedies.

That is why, when he heard of the failure of one man’s efforts to keep drugs out of a house high on the vice squad’s list of trouble-spots, he went to the door and gave away some spare shirts and what cigarettes he had. He stayed; became responsible for collecting the rent from the drifting population of tenants; found himself in the position of confessor and father figure for a group of frequently disoriented and frightened young people.

And that is why he sits alone in a Quaker hall in Mount Eden Road every Monday night, waiting for any junkie who might have heard the word on the underground grapevine to come and seek his help. So far there have been very few. He will go on. ‘Do not underrate the junkies,’ Baxter said. ‘There are already many among them who understand the scene and offer help to one another. But I would like to see more of it.’

Baxter is concerned with junkies because he is an alcoholic. ‘Not was,’ he said, ‘I still am. In the marrow of my bones I am an alkie first before a writer, or a Catholic, or anything else. I will be dead if I ever have another drink. And I remember my vast sense of relief when I realised that alcoholism was a disease and could be cured.’

He has never used drugs except on a doctor’s prescription; pills to keep him awake when he was working as a postman by day and writing at night. He is living in this house of hang-ups because he believes alkies are cousins of junkies. ‘I went in there because I felt it was the only place I could do some good. Elsewhere people are trying to change positive signs to positive. Here I page 54 am trying to change negative to positive.’

His clear grey eyes are direct as he talks of the problems . . . vice squad raids in the early morning hours (the lock on the front door stays broken) . . . finding that the non-users of drugs are already persuading visitors to flush their drugs down the lavatory . . . appealing to the police for tolerance about vagrancy charges in return for his efforts to keep the house free of drugs . . . encouraging the residents in their efforts to come out of the mental bomb-shelter of the world of drugs.

Talking with Baxter is like living on a diet of Christmas pudding; one soon develops mental indigestion from the richness of his poetic imagery and philosophy. Like the irritable quote on women he tossed off at me as he scuttled like a crab through a rainstorm to wire off to a female friend in need of some money he had received from book royalties: ‘Their complicated flapping and jellyfish psychology is like a great screaming rope of guts hung around your neck.’

But after the sometimes hysterical recent outpourings about drugs in New Zealand society, much of what he has to say on the subject makes very persuasive sense. ‘There is danger in drugs, of course, but it is only one of the dangers of our society. The drug scene is part of the international rebellion of youth against the Establishment. One should not blame anybody – parents, police, MPs, doctors. It is all part of a generalised fear, just one aspect of a society which does not understand itself. Behind all the drug scene is the desire for a private world that is more pleasant than the public one. And to people who say ‘Do we want this?’ – meaning the drug scene – I say, ‘Do we want the public world? Sometimes it is bloody horrible.’

There are about six permanent residents in the house where Jim Baxter lives; and there is no common type. They are as likely to come from Remuera as Ponsonby. Some are people who have rebelled against the dullness of office or factory jobs. Some are students who have dropped out of university because of rows with their parents about their hair being too long.

He talks about them with eloquence tinged with gentle irony, but never with the hard, brittle wit and epigrams of the superficial observer. ‘There is no typical junkie. Some are up in the air like giraffes eating the leaves off tall trees. Others are close to the ground like a wombat, always having terrible scenes with themselves, embracing gas ovens and threatening suicide.

‘There is no social distinction because they are all products of a cultural pattern that is determined to treat these young adults as children. Basically they are revolting against the materialism of the small and excessively moral minority who are setting our social standards.

‘The junk scene is also a reflection of the loss in our society of any communal life. These young people have families, but they are small, rigid units and the members cannot talk to each other. The kids think their parents are stupid and the parents are so anxious they cannot talk to their children.’

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Baxter knows his subjects. When he went into the house he nailed up a small crucifix above the door of each room. ‘I am not peddling my religion,’ he said. ‘But people who use drugs have many fears. A religious symbol can be reassuring. I say it keeps the demons away. Theological demons and policemen.

‘Most young drug users are dabblers. My friend John, the first president of Narcotics Anonymous here, made this point. They turn to drugs because of the chronic boredom and failure to communicate of life in the money-dungeon suburbs. Then there are the users. They are on starters (methedrine or dexedrine) to get a high; or else on stoppers (tranquillisers or barbiturates) to put them to sleep or to keep them in a big fuzzy limbo that is very similar to the escape scene of the alcoholic. And there are the users of psychedelic drugs, though they are fewer in numbers. They are putting bombs inside their heads looking for religious experience; at least, that is how it looks to me.

‘There is no common type. They are very individual people and they have more hang-ups than most; many of them finish up in Oakley getting their brains washed by a psychiatrist. But the important thing is that they are people.’

Baxter has been in the house several weeks and admits taking two steps forward and one back in his battle to keep it free of drugs. Visitors and former residents, some of them just out of jail or the asylum, and not yet off the drugs, are the biggest practical problem. ‘I have had them come in like an old horse going into its stable to lean on a bale of hay; they say, “I am home” and resent the gear-free (drug-free) atmosphere of the house. They come in stoned (drugged) and try to pass out gear; they are like alcoholics who resent non-drinking friends and try to get them to drink. I had one persuade others to join him on a high. He was not selling gear. He saw himself as the great saviour of those not on it.’

In situations like this, Baxter (‘I do not want to stop the use of junk . . . I am not policeman or a moralist . . . but I want to help whoever wants to get away from drugs’) does not order or insist. He seeks group discussion and cooperative action. Sometimes the junk is flushed down the lavatory; sometimes the visitor leaves with it.

‘A person on his own can do nothing. I started with the idea of a Narcotics Anonymous group based on A.A. ideas. Some of the ex-junkies welcomed it and began to try to put it into practice. I have received some help from Church groups and social agencies. But the most valuable information has come from people who have got off the junk themselves.

‘Thereare people of good will trying to help junkies through welfare work and committee work, but I do not think they can do a great deal. They do not understand the scene from the inside. There are some good doctors and psychiatrists who do help, but the big need is for something like Alcoholics Anonymous toestablish communication.

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‘Anything that works has to be communal with the real concern coming from the people involved. It has to be on a first-name basis; it cannot be a committee recommendation or an official report.’

Baxter, living on a small and sporadic income in royalties from previously published work, has sought no financial help for his crusade (he will hate to see it called that). To do so, he believes would be self-defeating.

‘To break from the drug scene people need a group relationship; a group love such as the Maoris call aroha. They need to be able to hold their heads up and not give way to the fear and paranoia caused by excessive legal activity that is always increasing tension and hang-ups among drug-users. They need a positive and loving attitude to, and from, their friends in the same position. They need truthful communication. This is the hardest thing, but it can work between people who have got off the junk together.’

Baxter believes that some sort of truce in police activity against the users of the less-harmful drugs is a critical first step toward a solution of the growing problem. And that can only come through more public tolerance toward, and understanding of, the young people involved. ‘The police are always asking junkies where the drugs are and how they got them, but nobody ever asks the critical question . . . why? The only answer ever given publicly is that these people are mentally and morally deficient. It is a very mistaken answer.’

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