The Breadfruit Eater

           

             The Mango Bar had been in full swing the night before and I’d drunk enough to wipe me out. Before the sun was fully up, I had dragged my sorry carcass to my favorite spot on the beach, and passed out before the weekend tourists swarmed in. I lay vegetating with a wet towel over my face to sooth my throbbing head. Several times I waved blindly at my leg, trying to swot off the Marsh Fly or whatever it was that was determined to bug my recovery. Aggravated, I pulled the towel from my face and felt my inner eye lids burnished red as they cracked opened to see the silhouetted figure haloed by the sun. He said nothing as he continued to stroke my thigh with a bird, woven from palm leaves, dangling from a stick.

             As I propped myself up, he laughed good-naturedly and knelt beside me.    His hair and beard, goldened by the sun, hung in long locks framing his face and aviator shades, sporting that iconic 70s rock-star-Jesus look. Maybe in his thirties, the faded Hawaiian shirt, loose khaki shorts, and skin encrusted with a deep earthen tan spiced with glistening sand, gave him that beach boy youthfulness. His close-lipped smile showed a sense of reserve.

            “Good morning.”

            “Where did you come from?”
           “Out there. That’s my catamaran.”

            “That’s small. You a day-tripper?”

            “No. I live on it.”

            “That is not an Aussie accent. Where are you from originally?”

            “California. In another lifetime. Via Melbourne to the Brisbane coast. And you?”

            “London. What’s with the bird?”

            “I weave them from palm leaves and sell them to tourists.”

            “You can make a living like that? I’m not buying.”

             He laughed and looked at me sternly for a moment, “It covers the essentials that nature can’t provide. I barter for other things. So, you wanna come see it?”

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             The world was a freer place back then and we of the backpack generation wanted to explore every unturned rock. We needed nothing except adventure to feed us and leapt at opportunities like a bull at a red rag. So sure, of course I’d go and check out his floating pad; I had time to kill before Fiona met me later that afternoon. The one-man catamaran was moored just offshore, and with the tide out, we were able to wade most of the way, only having to swim the last few legs. He pulled himself into the vessel first, his wet shirt sticking to his toned, muscular back. So? I was only looking! Then he hauled me up after him, swinging me up into his arms and embracing me with a smile. Hmm...maybe...

             Stepping down below deck, the bare wood finish made the cabin look dark and cramped with only a small strip lamp above a mini-sink. Crouching as space necessitated, I lit a Marlboro while my eyes adjusted to the light. Books, half-filled pots, and lank seedlings were scattered everywhere, and a worn-out mattress draped with a dingy sheet and a flattened beanbag served as furniture. He passed me a small, thin towel which I wrapped around my bikini for some modesty, while he slipped off his wet shirt and dried himself with a dingy t-shirt. Attempting to sit on the deflated beanbag with sensual flair, was a task that I only half-managed.  Finally removing his shades as he passed me a beer, I peered into those windows of the soul searching for an oracle. I was too immature to be discrete and asked outright why his irises were cloudy. He didn’t flinch.

            “Glaucoma.”

            “Aren’t you young to suffer from that?”

            “57.”

            “Boy. Gotta hand it to you - you look good on it. I had you pegged as late thirties. But isn’t that a simple op                 these days? Don’t they just scrap the film off the lens or something?”

             “No health insurance. And no I.D. I rejected all that commercial crap. Media dominates the world, and I                    should know I was part of it. But not now. I rejected that materialistic dogma!”

            Then motioning to a scant looking cannabis plant behind him, he settled down to roll a spliff.

            “All natural home-grown.”

             I smiled. He grinned back at me with a wide open smile, and for the first time I noticed his teeth had also rejected a materialistic dentist. We observed each other as we smoked in silence for a while. I was musing over whether I’d still fuck him. He might be in his fifties, but he still had that sexy Grizzly Adams cum Kris Kristofferson thing going on.

             

             Then he leaned back and told me his story. He'd been a successful American disc jockey, before moving to Melbourne in the 1970s. Back then radio DJs were star-makers and for Australians, this Californian accent ushered in the 20th Century. He was lavished with all the benefits of a fancy house, an array of sports cars, a well-used home bar, and a string of sexually liberated groupies. Then one day, he’d been interviewing a local scientist about the impending global food shortage, becoming fascinated as they discussed his research focused on the humble breadfruit. With its hefty nutrients, breadfruit could be grown anywhere and provided a healthier alternative to starches like potatoes or rice: proliferated, the scientist argued that it could end world hunger. That night the DJ had partied hard with friends, coke, booze, weed, and women. 

            The next morning, he woke clear-headed, having what he described as,

            “A total epiphany!”

            The epiphany sounded more like a breakdown to me. I took in a long, slow draw on the joint, focusing on the smoke stroking my throat and the creeping haze filtering out the seriousness. I nodding with nominal interest.  The last trip he made in his sports car was to the local garden centers, where he purchased every pack of breadfruit seed that he could find. He took his passport, birth certificate and all legal documentation and threw them into the fire pit, the same fire pit that just the night before he had danced around, tripping with his elitist friends.  Then he made some calls, transferring his banking and house into the name of a friend, and then left a message on the friend’s answering machine to tell him of his epiphany and parting gift. The small Filipino gardener was astonished and thought his employer completely bonkers when the DJ thrust the keys of the Lamborghini into his hands before waltzing off with the gardener’s wheelbarrow.

            After packing the wheelbarrow with a few essentials, frying pan, camping stove, towel, clothes, and pushbike, he headed for the open road.  His quest was to wheel his barrow along the 1200-mile coastal path from South Australia to Queensland, planting breadfruit seeds along the way to provide free food to everyone.  I hadn’t lived in Oz for long, but the effort seemed misplaced in the Land of Plenty, where everything from mangoes to lychee handed out their bounty freely to one and all. He showed me some newspaper cuttings from local rags, confirming his tale and where he had initially garnered some interest as a “human story”. The last one was dated seven years earlier, which he gifted me.

            “Since then, I haven’t read a newspaper, watched TV, listened to the radio. Devoid of the brainwashing of the capitalist rulers. Marketing is madness. They’re corrupting the human soul. I’m totally self-sufficient now. I have each day to appreciate nature and the real beauty in the world – not the ideas I’m sold by the media.” I nodded vacantly as I inhaled on the butt of the joint. We smoked some more for a while in silence, until I yawned.

            “Hey, I think I need to head back now. I’m meeting my girlfriend. Why don’t we catch up later outside the cabana?”

            The tide was heading in and so he rowed me back to the shore in the one-man rowboat, agreeing to meet that evening.

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            Fiona was bemused when I told her of my latest potential conquest but opted out of meeting him.

            “He sounds like another nut!”

            But I went anyway. Curious to see what he had planned for our “beach date.”  I arrived much later than arranged and spotted the DJ from the beach, and so I slowed my approach to allow me to study him from the shadows. He was surreptitiously hanging around the veranda of the cabana-style restaurant like a barfly: slouched against the railings and mesmerized by the TV screens hanging above the bar. The restaurant was quiet that night and the staff were glued to the Rugby World Cup Final, where the Wallabies were massacring the Poms.  After a large group had left their table, and while the servers were distracted by the game, the DJ snuck up and grabbed whatever leftovers he could from the table: stuffing half-eaten bread rolls, cold fries, and burgers into a hessian bag, sucking on a chicken wing as he went, and chugging down the dregs of the beer or wine left in other people’s glasses. A server finally spotted him and shooed him away. I watched him scurry off towards the dingy like Dicken’s Magwitch, but with no great expectations. Then I turned and walked back to my cabin. Fiona and I left for Cairns the next day.

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            After the wanderlust wore off and I returned to the comfort of civilization, I was browsing through my father’s bookshelf and came across a collection of W. Somerset Maugham’s short stories. “The Lotus Eater” tells the tale of a middle-aged banker, Thomas Wilson, who is devastated by the untimely death of his wife and child in a car crash. The banker cashes in his annuities, sells his possessions, and moves to the Italian island of Capri, where he had enjoyed his last family vacation. He calculates that he could live a comfortable life with cocktails on the veranda and a servant to look after his needs, until he reached 60 years old: an age when many men of his era died anyway. At that point his plan was to simply put an end to his life.  Somerset Maugham often visited Capri, a haven for gay men fleeing the anti-homosexual laws in England in the early 20th Century, and Wilson’s character was rumored to be based on Somerset Maugham’s first lover on Capri, John Ellingham Brooks. In the story, the narrator returns to the island to hear of Wilson’s fate. His failed suicide attempt had left him brain-damaged, and his servant having taken pity on him, had allowed him to sleep and eat in the barn alongside the animals. One morning, they found him on the hillside overlooking the coastal stacks known as Faraglioni, his last vision had been then very beauty which had drawn him to the island in the first place.

            I remembered visiting Capri in my teens.  The brilliant white steps endlessly, winding up from the harbor to the town on the hill. I remembered the awe-inspiring coastline and the beauty of Faraglioni, the cool breeze coming off the water, taming the humidity. The town was a collage of white, cream, and yellow buildings, interspersed with the green of the myrtle, heather and cypresses that clung to the rugged soil around the island. I thought of how different the historic island of Capri was to the beaches on the Australian coast. The former, romantic, almost regal, and proud while the latter was as wild as the outback, and as hip as a rave; but they shared the same hot sun with white sand beaches stretching out along the coast…and lotus eaters.

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            Sadly, I can’t give you the satisfactory, but pitifully sad, ending of Maugham's Lotus Eater. I could fabricate something, like maybe he met a nice Sheila who got him on meds, and he became a health guru? Or he died in a field of breadfruit plants, that starving refugees were surviving on. Somewhere in an attic, in another country is a battered cardboard box which contains the remnants of souvenirs from a travelled youth. I’ll find the newspaper cutting in there. One day.…maybe then I’ll search the web, who knows?

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Works Cited

Somerset Maugham, W. “The Lotus Eater.” The Mixture as Before. William Heinemann, 1940.