His is a fine kind of madness, a bravery. Not many elderly men decide to dress as a cross between a wizard and an Indian mystic and walk up to twenty-five kilometres each day around the community. And for someone of that style he’s remarkably down to earth. He’s not really a New Age guru although he’ll advise you on the meaning of life if you want, or do a healing on you for a small donation if you wish it. He waved hands over my knee once; it didn’t work but neither did it do any particular harm and it was very kind of him to try. Or he’ll sell you one of the amazing walking staffs he makes. The local cinema briefly hired him as a greeter while they were showing Lord of the Rings, for his Gandalfian quality. But really he’s an artist and he is his own artwork.
He walks everywhere, and is a feature of the landscape. A moving patch of bright silks and glittering silver on a dull day. You enjoy seeing him instinctively, even look for him: a personal and actual 'Where's Wally' game. He talks to anyone and shares out his unusual view of the world. Surprisingly he is fiercely political, because we might expect someone who looks as he does to be more fatalistic, professionally peaceful. But he detests the police, is a ratbag radical and still at seventy-eight years old attends the demonstrations, facing up to the riot controllers shoulder to shoulder with burly dock workers and truck drivers. I wonder what the hell they think of him. I suspect they treat him with amused tolerance, like some form of mascot.
Recently a group of special operations police cornered him during an unlikely manhunt. He had the little red laser beads all over him, he complained. “They said it was a case of mistaken identity,” he growled. It took us a very long time to stop laughing about that one. If there’s anyone that he could be mistaken for around here, I’d really like to meet them. The Police Chief Commissioner has apologised and he quite likes her, possibly because most of her troops do not.
Tongue in cheek I suggested that we could establish a religion around him. It wouldn’t be hard. He looks the part and people have approached him reverently, touched his coat, even kissed his bejewelled and bangled hands. Often they seem to be Indian or Asian, Buddhists perhaps. He’d have to curb his natural inclinations at times, his tendency to retort, ‘Get nicked,’ when teased. They might see it as an instruction to get circumcised. Perhaps he could just adopt a seraphic look and then we acolytes could interpret his muttered utterances and invest them with deep meaning. There is a wonderful business opportunity in this, a simple one that has made many people seriously wealthy. So many people are looking so desperately for something in which to believe and they may as well believe in Des as anything or anyone else. It would almost certainly bring them deep happiness and there’s nothing too wrong with that. Oh, and he does have an attractive message too. ‘Find your own freedom’ is implicit. ‘Art is good, sex is good – do lots of both,’ are others. You simply can’t go wrong with ideas like that. The difficulty would be in expanding them enough to make an appropriately convoluted gospel.
He has miracles that could be attributed to him. One day a young German visitor to the area approached and claimed that, while lost in the wilds of Tasmania, he’d seen a vision of Des walking before him and, following, he reached safety. “Funny that,” the great man commented, “because at that time I was walking in the forest around here, hundreds of kilometres away and I was even wearing the colour he said.” And then there was the woman who claimed that he was the father of her son even though they’d never met and were two thousand kilometres apart at the moment of conception. “She’d showed me a photograph of this fifteen year old kid and he looked just like me, honest.” Now there’s a new kind of miracle – transcendental insemination.
But he won’t be in it of course. A quick book, a few ceremonies and we could all be wealthy but he’s not a product and would never follow the rules long enough to be a charismatic leader, even by proxy. Ah well, I couldn’t swallow the lie myself anyway.
