On Meeting A Retired Orange

It was in the 00s, I had a job in Melbourne for a couple of weeks, working on a story, and I suggested to my editor I might also do a profile on the titular Mr Fruit. We had arranged to meet in the lobby of his building, but then he decided upstairs would be both more comfortable and convenient. I assumed these adjectives were euphemisms. If the article needed colour, it was there for the transfer in ‘call me Dirk’s’ apartment. But it was also distracting, looking at the gold soccer balls, the purple inflatables, and the movie posters. Dirk made us drinks while I was reminded of several dreams I’d had that week, of a book on Freud, a basement flat with a view of a record shop, a Danish that a man brought into a café in Berlin, that was a cushion for its own topping. Some of the posters featured Dirk, who’d had a brief career in LA, and had also toured the east coast doing cabaret. Have you spent any time in Western Australia? I asked, thinking this was a fairly neutral question to start us off. I had done some research of course, but there were a lot of time gaps, and Dirk had pretty much already retired by the advent of the internet. He twiddled with the clove in his cheek, as if it were a nuance adjuster of historical trauma. It turned out – off the record – the whole thing was off-off-off – that Dirk had done a support act for Fantasy Walker in Perth, it was an unofficial thing but also a cover for Fantasy’s affair with a local footballer, and Fantasy was too messed up to perform, and Dirk had to take the fall in some way: was literally told by Fantasy’s manager to fall off the stage. ‘I’m not a stunt act,’ Dirk had replied witheringly. While that was an intriguing/boring story, I was more interested in what my readers would be interested in: Hollywood and its sucking up of Australian talent, making them so popular they were like craft spokespeople, with indeterminable accents, paraded at black tie parties like weird big talking cats…But I was getting distracted by my own prejudicial thinking. ‘Can you tell me about working with Quentin Tarantino, and how that came about, he read something about you somehow, and created a role based on your own life, for the movie Salad Mayhem?’ ‘Yes,’ said Dirk, ‘Quentin was in a Sydney café, flipping through the Star Observer, and got drawn into a little biographical profile about me, and created the character Orange la Grande based on it, and which I played without too much difficulty. Orange la Grande is an ex-cop drag queen with a coke habit, which she manages to kick, and who then takes down the drug cartel responsible for exporting this particular supply to the US, and falls in love with the son of a drug lord. Lots of gunfire and local music. I hinted to Quentin that there was a potential sequel to the story, and he seemed charmed by the idea. I still write to Paolo, the actor who played my romantic interest, you know.’ ‘Do you miss show business?’ I asked. ‘Oh,’ he said, and his ‘oh’ was like a crow, making a white deposit on a cat below, ‘I was never interested in the entertainment industry, really, I’m an artist. I prefer doing non-commercial projects. People associate me with the early 90s, or the late 80s, and want to keep me in one of those boxes, lined with their own restrictive notions of irony, and critique, which they can bring out at boring parties, but I never actually retired. I’ve been working on an opera based on ‘Five Bells’, it’s an Australian poem from 1939, and I’ve been writing songs with Paolo on Skype, we’re not sure of the format to present it in, or where. There is a Five Bells opera evening in Chelsfield, which used to be a village in Kent, but is now treated like a London suburb. I’m not sure how the locals feel, but I have Kentish ancestry myself, so that would be nice. Or we could do something in Pasto, where Paolo is, in Colombia. I can see the poster now, can you? We’d need some funding, of course.’ ‘That certainly doesn’t sound commercial!’ I agreed, or thought I was agreeing. Dirk narrowed – or chilled – himself towards me at that point. ‘I thought it might make the basis for a Terence Davies movie.’ I started looking up Terence Davies on my phone, which seemed to affront Dirk. ‘Terence Davies! My God!’, and then began singing a song which seemed to be called ‘Different Curios’ (also very pop title I thought sourly, afterward) in a kind of Barbra Streisand’s ‘The Way We Were’ mode. ‘That’s what we were to each other’; ‘different languages, different cultures’: it seemed oddly apt, that the sequel to a Tarantino movie would be recast as a Terence Davies movie, who I remembered, when I found him online. ‘Are you actually in a love relationship with Paolo?’ I dared ask, as I made moves to leave. ‘I’m interested in difference, not love,’ said Dirk, in a mean intellectual tone. ‘Love dissolves difference.’