Your time has come

I've been wandering sideways
I've stared straight into the sun
Still I don't know why you're dying
Long before your time has come
- Audioslave, 2005

On a day like today, you celebrated the small victories. The trip back from Central Otago wasn’t awkward, because it was conducted at a quarter to sparrow-fart in the morning and Lena slept soundly in the back the whole way. The only awkward part about it was the sunrise streaming through the dirty windscreen whenever the thing was pointed in a vaguely easterly direction. Which was much of the trip. Still, at least we’d been granted a stellar day to say our farewells to Tractor, and Bear and the Outback knew the road well enough – the sprint across the high plains of the Maniototo to Ranfurly, followed by the plunge down the coastal range through Middlemarch towards Outram, descending through sweeper after glorious sweeper as the scenery merged from parched tussocky grasslands to lush farming slopes. A brilliant driver’s road. I’d remembered us chasing Tractor and the boys up here in rented Transit vans on one of the earliest Anzac Cultural Exchange tours, McCarthy giving it grim death, Marty just resembling same, and Bear flinging McDonalds byproduct at us from the van in front. Not even a chocolate thickshake across the windscreen was able to incite a tactical backdown from Uncle Sam. He’d have given that scary German chick from Top Gear a run for her money around the old Nurburgring in that form, let me tell you.

After the couple of days I’d had, meeting Marty and Phil was like encountering visitors from another planet. We’d almost got back into town with enough time in hand for a surf, but there wasn’t any time or surf to be found there, so I’d left Bear and a reluctantly wakeful Lena to get their Awkward on back at Bear’s place – which amazingly enough was spotlessly clean, given we’d fully expected Hollywood to have bailed and stayed at a hotel – and headed out to the airport in my mostly useless rental Getz to collect the boys from the same scheduled flight which had delivered Lena to Dunedin a few days earlier. It was weird seeing them in the unfamiliar context of the environment I’d been immersed in over the past days. Weird, but reassuring, as though the cavalry had arrived, as though I didn’t have to fight today’s battles on my own.

On the way back into town I told Phil and Marty about our adventures in Central, tracking Sam’s last movements and final resting place. While the boys filed through the photos and video I’d taken on the iPhone, Phil piped up and suggested we take a detour up there as he’d really like to check the place out himself. He still thought this was a fab idea even after we’d carefully explained that it was an eight-hour round trip and Tractor’s funeral service was in three. Ah, Phil. Where would we be without him. Sane, possibly.

Still, it was going to be a better day with the boys here than it would have without them. For one, it meant I could take Lena and the boys out for lunch and finally give Bear some space in his own house and in his own head, now that he was in a position to handle both without flipping the fuck out and needing to obliterate himself. He’d forgotten – possibly deliberately – that he’d been charged with the task of delivering one of the eulogies at the service, the one on behalf of Tractor’s friends, so he stayed back and worked on that instead. We picked him up something suitably sober to wear from the hire place where my ensemble was coming from – a bit poignantly they still had his measurements from when they’d hired the suits for Tractor’s groomsman posse.

And, then, all of a sudden, we were piling into the Subaru, all five of us – Marty had quietly taken it for a quick clean and detail while Phil and I were sorting the suits – and heading out across the Taieri Plain again for the third time today.

Should pause to explain the geography a bit for those that don’t know the area, which is probably most of you. Tractor’s family farm – the one where he’d grown up, still in the family having been taken on by the Tractor’s uncle after his old man’s death, then passed on to his kids after he passed on himself – was out on the western fringes of the Taieri in the shadows of the range, not far from Outram where State Highway 87 started winding up towards Middlemarch, the Maniototo and Central, where we’d come from that morning. Dunedin Airport, as I’ve probably mentioned a while back, was also out this way, being the only bit of flat land within twenty miles of town. It was out at the family farm that the service was to take place, for a variety of reasons – Aroha had wanted to have it at their own farm, but access to their place down on the Peninsula was fairly ropey for hearses and elderly relatives in hire cars and the like, and the family farm was better set up to host people in numbers undercover in case of shit weather. More importantly it was closer to the small regional West Taieri cemetery where the Tractor was to be laid to rest next to his parents. Tractor’s cousin Hamish, who ran the farm for the family nowadays, was cut from similar cloth to the Tractor himself – stocky, staunch, handy rugby player in his youth, though these days more Wal Footrot than Buck Shelford.

The service itself was in the Outram community hall – in hindsight that church which Tractor and Aroha had rescued from that tiny abandoned settlement in Central would have been perfect, but they could hardly have put it on a flatbed truck and brought it over this way. My faith in the people around Aroha, who were looking after her and after the arrangements for today – was completely borne out. It’d all been sorted. Aroha herself was holding it together admirably, far better than even I’d expected. She was staunch, as they say down here. As solid as if she’d been hewn from the Southern Alps themselves. She thanked Lena and I for looking after Bear for her. I didn’t really think it was the time or place to point out Lena had done more ‘looking after’ than I had.

As for Bear himself… he was OK. If you ignored the lines around the eyes, and the faint whiff of rum on his breath – masked by breath mints and toothpaste - and noted he was tracking straight and true, if not quite ship-shape and Bristol fashion. Lena had put The Awkward aside long enough to help him look presentable before we’d left. He had his spiel together, which ran for a couple of minutes, and which he described briefly in the car – sounding like he was well on top of the material, even if a little nervous about screwing up and dropping the F-bomb or similar weapons of mass distraction.

“Mate, today, I can’t see it mattering,” I told him. “It’ll be understood and forgiven, I guarantee it.”

He took that on board with a nod and half a smile. And really, he was OK. Or he would have been, but for what he was obliged to follow. There was Aroha’s eulogy, which left very few dry eyes in the room, mine included; then Tractor’s sister Sarah got up and performed a song which she and Tractor had written together a few years ago, called Search and Rescue. A long, long way from Search and Destroy by the Stooges, which was more along the lines of Tractor’s usual songwriting genre, this was written when Tractor was emerging from the blackness of his various demons and trying to recover his humanity and his relationship with Aroha and his children. It was about that, but also about the distances between people – geographic and otherwise – and the lengths needed to overcome them and to forgive them for their failings. It was a stark, beautiful song, which Sarah’s lilting vocals, breaking at the edges, carried to phenomenal heights. About the only person who held it together was Hollywood, who was accompanying her on classical acoustic. I think he played on the studio original too, which had been her first breakthrough song in the UK indie scene. He kept his head down and concentrated on his work, so noone would have really noticed if he had shed a few tears, even if he’d shown rare discretion and had left the gold-rimmed aviator sunnies at home.

So that’s what Bear and his stories about Tractor had to follow, and he never stood a chance. He went to bits. No matter how much we wanted him to make it through OK – and I realised I’d been tense as a coiled spring most of the day, mostly about that very thing – it didn’t help him. The words wouldn’t come.

Hollywood emerged from somewhere, sat him down, and took over. And did a sterling job, the sort of job you’d expect a former Auckland Grammar prefect who could hold his own in corporate boardrooms just as well as he did on rock stages to be able to pull off. Slickly delivered, sharply timed, and from the heart. With those skills, I thought, he’ll be a member of parliament one day. Maybe even Environment Minister.

But the damage had been done – to Bear at least. He completed his obligations silently and stoically – pallbearer, along with myself, D, Hamish and a couple of Tractor’s old mates from school – then returned to the farm with the rest of us and spent the duration of the wake getting completely, woefully, belligerently smashed. Because he’d failed. Tractor, Aroha, the family, the boys, and himself – he’d failed them all. And worst of all, that smug fucking bastard Hollywood had come out of it looking like a superhero and he just looked like a cunt. So rather than engage further with the issue, he got fucking rotten instead. Of course, this wouldn’t have mattered that much if not for the fact that Hollywood, figuring his job was done and he’d played nice long enough, also decided to help himself liberally to the grog Hamish had put on, ignoring the passive-aggressive angst this was incurring from his ‘partner’ Savannah.

Even early in the evening, conflict seemed inevitable, and so it ended up.

I should have followed him into battle, Kent to his King Lear. I had my orders; they were to Look After Him. But I couldn’t face it. Couldn’t face his regression to where we’d been when I got here, the feeling that we’d gotten nowhere, that Bear was back where he started from and that I’d been deluding myself that I could do anything about it in the first place. I had one or two myself, but stayed out of the argument. It didn’t need my input. Bear and Hollywood argued politics, religion and rugby – the three things you never argue about in New Zealand, and three things which the two of them never had or would see eye to eye on. Politics: Bear, like me, was a pragmatic lefty, while the thing about Hollywood becoming an MP wasn’t entirely facetious, but if he was going to be recruited by anyone it’d be the Nationals – his politics were strongly conservative, though more on an economic basis than a social one. Religion: It had been Hollywood who’d vetoed Imaginary Friends, a song Bear had written with me years back, from a spot on Hayabusa’s second album, seeing it as an attack on (his) religion whereas Bear had written it as anti-fundamentalism, against the raft of superstition, bigotry, violence and non-intellectual bullshit perpetuated by fundamentalist religions. And as for rugby… Bear had been here a long time, but not long enough to forget what colour his passport was. The ABs held the Bledisloe in perpetuity but choked in every World Cup, and the coach of the Wallabies was a Cantab who’d been passed over for the All Black coaching gig. ‘Nuff said really.

It wasn’t pleasant, but they were big boys, had been mates for the best part of ten years despite their differences and could sort their own shit out. I had an excuse to stay out of it – well, I found one anyway, running Lena, Marty and Phil to the airport to meet their connection to Christchurch for their flight back across the Tasman. A flight my management would have strongly preferred I was also taking rather than the Tuesday departure I’d booked. To be fair I kinda felt the same way right about now, but it was too late for that shit. I hadn’t really noticed whether things were still weird between Lena and Bear, and the farewell embrace between them back at the farm wasn’t really that informative. It should have been the last thing on my mind but, like I say, I was looking for distractions.

Wasn’t just me, either. I was fishing a Coke out of the ‘chully bun’ when I encountered the silent partner in the Hayabusa enterprise, Tenacious D. Silent today, anyway. He’d kept a pretty low profile – as low as an eighteen-stone Pacific Islander with a six-inch ’fro can keep, anyway – and given the draining couple of days he’d had, I didn’t blame him. We’d had similar experiences really – I’d kinda been doing the job of supporting the boys down here that he would have done had he not been doing it for his family up in the North Island, and he appreciated that. Didn’t need to say it, because D didn’t need to say much of anything really. He had that sort of gravitas. Which is not to say he was of sufficient mass to have his own gravitational pull, he was still a good few pies away from anything along those lines.

He nodded out the doorway to where Bear and Hollywood were still going each other ferociously. Judging by the look on his face, his opinion of the carryings-on was pretty unambiguous. Unless you were crap with non-verbal communication, like I was.

“What do you make of that then?” I asked him.

He considered for a moment. “It’d be really nice,” he pronounced, his voice a low Shaq-esque rumble, “if the only people they were embarrassing was themselves.”

I nodded. “Feel like we should break it up somehow,” I observed.

D, who’d seen this thing before plenty of times, disagreed. He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Delaying the inevitable,” he pointed out. “Better they vent. If they embarrass themselves further, then...” By further, I assumed he meant if things turned physical. I doubted it’d come to that. Hollywood would be running for his shiny red Porsche as fast as his skinny legs would carry him, because if Bear actually wanted to fight him, he’d likely kick his fucking head in. Not that I could ever remember Bear actually hurting anyone, ever. I’d seen him smack Brady Priddle in the mouth once, many years ago before both ourselves and Hayabusa had banned his lot of cunts from the list of bands we were prepared to tour with, but that had been under provocation and had been a fairly gentle slap, even though the police report Priddle tried to file claimed it’d been a full-blooded right hook. Which is probably what he actually deserved at the time given he’d just loudly drawn Bear’s mother’s sexual history into question.

“Come check this out,” D directed. I followed him into the house, where most of the remaining wake-attendees were gathered, chatting in groups or grazing over the spread Hamish, Aroha and both sides of the family had put on for their guests. D picked out a wiry fifty-something bloke talking with Hamish and another family member across the way. I recognised the bloke – hadn’t seen him since Tractor’s wedding, but had certainly heard of him. Like I said, today was a day for celebrating small victories, and catching up with Barry Norton seemed like a win to me. I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like. I liked Barry Norton’s idea of art. Fit-for-purpose engineering feats so brilliantly conceived and realised as to take the breath away. His work was as close to an art form as dropping massive fuck-off crate motors into re-engineered old muscle cars can possibly get.

Tractor had met Barry seven or eight years ago, at a muscle car show. Hayabusa’s first album was a success and Tractor had decided to indulge himself by getting hold of one of the most memorable cars he recalled his old man owning, a Valiant Charger from the early ‘70s. Which is how, down the track, he came to be at a Charger Owners Club show and shine with a beautifully restored 1971 Charger R/T 265 in what Chrysler Australia called ‘blonde olive’ and what everyone else would have called ‘beige’ – given the lairy colours in the Charger repertoire, it wasn’t too surprising the Tractor’s old man had opted for something less overtly, well, Australian. Parked in the bay next to Tractor’s was a purple V8 Charger ‘770’ – the model after his, with the round headlights – in restoration-original nick, and another Charger in Vitamin C (a particularly virulent shade of yellow) slammed on twenty-inch dubs with a decidedly non-standard drag-racing supercharger intake looming out of the bonnet. The owner was Barry Norton. Or he was, for as long as it took Tractor to find his chequebook and calm his bank manager down.

Barry had an interesting career before he ended up building custom muscle cars for footballers, rock stars, media types and other moneyed extroverts. He’d been an Army paratrooper, trained as a mechanical engineer, worked for Ford in Melbourne as a chassis development engineer and ran his own panel beating and custom fabrication business in Auckland. His interests converged when a panel beating client asked him whether he’d be interested in helping doing some modifications to his ex-rally Mark II Escort to turn it into a hillclimbing special – bigger guards to fit wider wheels, lightened bodywork, and cramming a turbocharged 13B rotary out of a Mazda RX7 into the thing. At the same time he’d been roped into a restoration job on a Falcon GTHO Phase II which had been binned into a powerpole showing off on K Road. The rebuilt GTHO ended up as a concours-winning magazine cover, and East Coast Bays Smash Repairs began to develop a reputation for more than just patching up bingled vehicles.

After a few years Barry bit the bullet, renamed the shop, and retargeted its focus to what had originally been an interesting and occasionally profitable sidelight: building muscle cars, whether restorations to original, or customisation to anything but. That had been ten or so years ago, and fair to say it’d been onward and upward ever since. His clientele was anyone from cashed up private enthusiasts like Tractor and D – he’d built the latter a lo-rider ’65 Chev Impala convertible to cruise around and soak up the sun in – to corporate clients like Coca-Cola, for whom he was building the Ultimate Kombi – a late ‘60s split-window Kombi body transplanted onto the chassis of a Hilux 4WD and pimped out like only Xzibit could dream of, the major prize for a Coke Zero promo competition timed for the start of the ski season. Special customs, movie cars and the like were becoming a bigger interest for the shop, particularly with the rise in overseas film and TV productions in NZ, though the core business was still muscle cars – original restorations, right-hand-drive import conversions of new US-market stuff like Mustangs, Corvettes and Dodge Challengers, and of course Barry’s favourites, reinventing venerable old weapons with transplanted modern engineering.

Tractor had commissioned a series of cars from Barry’s shop over the years – the original impulse-bought Charger, equipped with a very non-roadworthy Mopar Hemi intended for drag-racing, ended up being bought back as a rolling demo unit by Barry (after a minor throwing-of-toys by Aroha) for which role it had originally been built. In its place, Barry built Tractor a street-legal replica of the ‘Eleanor’ Shelby GT500 Mustang from Gone In 60 Seconds. A few years later, proving that neither of them was wedded to any particular member of the Big Three of American iron, Barry followed Tractor’s orders of ‘one with the lot’ to the letter, putting together a thermonuclear first-generation Chevy Camaro SS with a monumental 427ci GM Performance ‘crate’ motor, six-speed Tremec T56 gearbox out of the Corvette ZR1, massive AP brakes, race suspension out of a Trans-Am Camaro which had been written off in a high-speed crash at Pukekohe – in the end, not too dissimilar to the running gear promised for the stillborn HRT 427 supercar which Holden Special Vehicles had been showing off a few years earlier (as distinct from the diluted W427 thing they eventually did build). The Monaro-based HRT 427 went on to with the ‘production’ Bathurst 24 Hours two years running, the second time with the late great Brocky at the wheel, despite never actually going into actual, erm, production. Tractor’s Camaro did at least make it to a production run of one – notwithstanding the boost in Barry’s regular ‘production’ that such a high-profile, award-winning, magazine-cover-hog provided for his order book – but that was one hell of a production unit.

Only one problem with that, of course. A cramped, thundering, terrifying, 500bhp race-car-for-the-road isn’t really the sort of thing you might want to be driving when you’ve just woken up from being a rock star dickhead and have realised you are married with two children. Boot space tends to be limited when the boot is full of race-spec bladder-style fuel tank. Not to mention the joy of trying to get uncooperative kids into car seats with no Isofix points on the back seat, no back doors, and no quick-release to flick the front seats out of the way, which were full race buckets and bolted down anyway. Given the choice between keeping his family or keeping the Camaro, Tractor went back to Barry and asked him two questions: (a) Any chance you could find me a buyer for the Camaro? (b) Any chance you could build me a family car? To which the answers, as always, were (a) yes, and (b) yes.

Which was how we came to be standing in a shed, fluorescent lights illuminating the dust, watching Barry tugging a tarpaulin off a vaguely car-shaped object. A flash of orange, set off with black, was the first instinctive response. It’s another Charger? New right-hand-drive Challenger?... No, it’s… Holy shit, it’s…

“1971 VH Hemi Pacer,” Barry noted with a grin. And so it was. Bugger me. “These things were the fastest four-door production six in the world for years. Of course, this one’s not completely stock standard. No longer a six, for starters...”

It looked it, though. The ‘Eleanor’ Mustang and the 427 Camaro SS had been show-stopping, attention-grabbing monsters, everything pumped out to the max, everything louder than everything else - but this looked like a beautifully restored ‘period’ muscle car. Could almost pass for a ‘trailer princess’ special, in the running for Best Presented at the Chrysler Owners Club show. Hemi Orange with black bonnet, rear shoulder slash and tail stripe; authentic 70s-style Globe ‘jellybean’ alloys; unadorned by towel-rack spoilers or gutter-scraping splitters. It looked, for want of a better term, stock. If you ignored, or didn’t pick up, the wider tyres, lower stance or the non-factory GTHO Phase III style ‘shaker’ discreetly peeking through the bonnet.

“It was going to be just a standard 5.7 Hemi out of a Chrysler 300C,” Barry observed ruefully, as we surveyed the preposterous donk under the bonnet. “Figured on making it as maintenance-friendly as possible by using as many standard Chrysler-Dodge parts as possible, ideally you could just take it for servicing at your local Chrysler dealer. ‘Course that idea lasted as long as it took Dan to find out what was the biggest crate motor Mopar made that would fit…”

That’d be 6.4 litres, or 392 cubic inches, as it turned out. In case you misinterpreted the ‘HEMI 392’ lettering emblazoned in red across the rocker covers, or on the side of the car in the period style of the Pacer’s original ‘HEMI 265’ stickers. The rest of the car, though, had stuck by the design brief. The transmission was the SRT-8 five-speed auto originally designed by former Chrysler owners Mercedes for their super-high-torque AMG performance cars, which handled the five hundred horses of the special-order Hemi quite nicely thanks very much. The suspension was designed from race geometry based on what the historic touring car racers were using on their Chargers these days, reproduced in alloy and strung up with modern adjustable shocks and dampers, cockpit-switchable on servo motors between softer ‘comfort’ and firmer ‘sport’ settings. The brakes were the biggest pizza dishes that would fit behind the old-school Globe alloys. Inside, though, was the largest diversion from Barry’s previous cars for Tractor. Where previously there’d been a bipolar mix of race-bred engineering spartandom mixed with Pimp My Ride fulleh-siiick one-upmanship, this was a much more polished, focused setup. It was pretty clear what the focus was, too; DVD players in the backs of the front seats, climate control ducts, adjustable electric seats out of a Merc (reupholstered in 70s style stitched leather to look like original Hemi Pacer bucket seats), power windows, power mirrors, cruise control, the latest and greatest stereo (with a remarkably restrained subwoofaaaaa), and most remarkably of all, actual boot space.

All superbly engineered, and all very Fit For Purpose – but in a completely different way to his previous cars had been. I could see this thing on the cover of NZV8 magazine, winning awards, gathering plaudits and being featured on performance car shows like his usual flagships, but I could just as easily see it cruising down to St Clair Esplanade with the kids in the back, or taking them to weekend sport, or even just doing the Woolies run with a bootload of groceries.

The only thing I couldn’t see, sadly, was it doing the job it was made for.

It’d been appalling timing, of course. Barry had finished the ‘project’ just as Tractor went into steep decline. It’d all been bought and paid for, but the chances of this ‘family car’ ever being used by Tractor’s family were next to nil. Given Aroha couldn’t even stomach having the thing out at the farm, it didn’t seem likely she’d be swapping it for the Territory as family chariot. It’d find a buyer, no question – even in the current dodgy economic climate – but that wasn’t really the point.

“Spark it up?” observed D.

Barry nodded. “Hasn’t run for a few days,” he reported, fishing the keys out of his pocket and sliding behind the wheel, “not since I brought it down, so it might pop and fart a bit. Still, the idea behind moving to electronic fuel injection is to make the things a lot less temperamental about starting…”

Whatever he said after that was lost in a cacophony of noise as the starter whirred once and ignited a thunderous roar from the twin pipes. It wasn’t the loudest thing I’d heard roll out of Barry’s shop – I’d never seen the infamous Camaro SS 427 in person, it’d been ‘after my time’ as it were, but standing next to the ‘Eleanor’ GT500 was like trying to sleep inside a 747 engine - but that throaty rumble at idle still had the hairs on the back of the neck standing at attention. Like Dr Cletus’ old Falcon ute (technically ‘my’ ute, though I still wasn’t prepared to admit that in public) amplified through a Marshall stack and played through AC/DC’s live setup.

“It’s remarkably refined,” Barry reported, once he’d shut off the thunder and we’d got our hearing back. “Coming down here, running it in, it was smooth as. Wasn’t too sure about EFI before, but now…” Tractor’s cars often ended up as test beds for new technology Barry was yet to try out on a larger scale, usually because of Tractor wanting the latest, greatest and most of everything. After all, this was a bloke who’d once thought a Suzuki Hayabusa would make an excellent commuter bike for round town. “Better fuel economy of course, too.”

“Not likely to scare a Prius though…”

Barry grinned. “It’d eat a Priapse for breakfast and crap out the batteries whole.” He nodded, adding, “Overdrive at highway speeds, it’s not too bad. Thirty mile a gallon’s easy doable. On 98 octane pump fuel. Bit lumpy on 91, but I’d never recommend using that shit in my cars unless you’re desperate.”

“Not the sort of car,” D noted, “that encourages thrifty motoring.”

Barry agreed. “If you want to save money on petrol, well…”

“Take the fuckin’ bus,” I finished with a smile.

We stood there, just staring at it, for quite a while. It was more fun than refereeing the barney outside, and it was such a brilliant piece of kit. It was just as well the house hadn’t sold yet, or I’d have been in dire risk of asking Barry what he could sort for me in, say, a 1973 LJ Torana GTR in iridescent metalflake orange. With, for argument’s sake, a small-block Chev, maybe that Corvette motor they’re dropping into HSVs now… race suspension and brakes, like what the historic racers use… similar retro alloys to this, maybe five-spoke Globes, fairly stripped out inside – none of this subwooofaaaaaa crap, just adds weight… replica-looks but track-day performance. Genuine restoration specials had their place, but there’s always room for improvement on original…

Yeah. Genius idea. The XR-Not ute was a fugly bogan sack of arse, but at least it owed me nothing. After all, the only sure-fire way to make a small fortune out of collectable ’70s muscle cars was to start with a large one.