Bob Jones is still boxing

by MICHELE HEWITSON

Penguins are kleptomaniacs. Jellyfish get anorexia. Absolutely true, insists property investor, millionaire, novelist and well-known practical joker Bob Jones. "Now I'm not pulling your tit here. I'm telling you the truth."

That's the truth as contained in fiction in Jones' about-to-be-published picaresque black comedy Full Circle - A Modern Morality Tale (Hazard Press, $24.95).

Penguin kleptomania happens to be an acknowledged scientific fact, although Jones maintains he didn't know this when he made it up as a way of poking serious fun at the science "beards" that he keeps firmly in his novelist's sights.

Still, with Jones - the man who once staged a mayoral campaign for Wellington transvestite Carmen, during which he announced that she had become engaged to his mate Ron Brierley - it never hurts to check. And it occurs to me, as I put in a call to Dr John MacDonald at the School of Biological Services at the University of Auckland, that it would greatly appeal to Jones' sense of humour to think of journalists calling eminent scientists to inquire whether jellyfish really do suffer from anorexia. (MacDonald confirms the penguin yarn. He says he's never heard the jellyfish theory but "that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.")

Beards, the English aristocracy, the Anglican Church ... all are grist to Jones' satiric mill. And his main protagonist, Len, just happens to love boxing and fly-fishing and is a self-made man. Hence the disclaimer that Full Circle "is in no way autobiographical."

There is no suggestion, god forbid, that knight of the realm Sir Robert Jones would have been capable of dreaming up a moneymaking scam which involves taking a cruise ship loaded with prostitutes to the Antarctic with the sole objective of parting "beards" from their money.

But Bob Jones the novelist proves more than capable of such a bound of the imagination - and much larger ones besides.

He has written, he says, about boxing and fly-fishing because "those are the things I know about." He has written about a scheme for getting rid of ageing and expensive clergy by having the Church offer them free heaters with wonky wiring which will electrocute the old dears because, well, it's funny.

"I laugh, and I suspect you do, at certain deaths. Man sprains ankle. Ambulance comes. Ambulance goes over a bloody cliff and he's dead. To me, that's hilarious. There are some awfully sober people who would consider that to be sick humour. It's not sick, is it?"

The book, he says, will doubtless offend some people "because they're dreary bastards."

But he is ever so slightly worried that it may offend some journalists. Which is very odd indeed. Jones is, after all, the former boxer who infamously punched television journalist Rod Vaughan, breaking his nose.

There is revenge of a sort (that's my reading; Jones denies that the book could well be subtitled A Modern Revenge Tale) to be had in fiction.

He has come up with a generic name for journalists - sludges. In a scene where Len and his partner in prostitution believe they have a snooping reporter on board, a proposal is put forward to buy him off with a session with one of the girls.

It's quickly vetoed. "He's a reporter, remember. You couldn't get him to pay for coffee if he could avoid it and, believe me, journalists are pretty adroit at dodging payment for anything."

He did go "a bit over the top" on the press, Jones admits. "I'm dependent on them, they can rubbish the book," says the bloke who once greeted a reporter sent to interview him with the line: "That's the worst tie I've ever seen in my life."

The sludges among us actually get off remarkably lightly. Jones saves the worst of his wrath for scientists. He is obviously particularly fond of "beards" as a breed.

"It's taken over from cellphones," he says from a telephone he has recently tamed in his Wellington office. (Years ago he had an office in the Hutt and would regularly biff phones out the window where they landed on the INL newspaper cars parked at the back of the building.)

"I have to restrain myself from punching people walking down the street talking into a cellphone." He doesn't own one, "wouldn't know how to use one," and has a suspicion of anything that passes as technology.

"I avoid all things electrical because they never work, for me." He bought his first radio this year - "to listen to the cricket at night from England." He hand-wrote Full Circle , "at home, at night, when I'm pissed."

Now that would have been a sight worth peeking through a window at: Sir Bob in his Lower Hutt mansion, glass of red wine at hand, pen racing with glee across the pages. You'd have heard him laughing before you spotted him.

"I can tell you this: it was one of the happiest experiences I've ever had," he says. "I cried with laughter at what I'd written. It was enormous fun."

But he says there's a serious point to his satire. In an episode where a prostitute discovers that the scientist who has fallen in love with her cooks "penguin crap" for a living, Jones is pointing out that "here's a fellow whose attitude to the state is that it's just a cornucopia. The state pays for him to cook penguin crap.

"You see, I get angry about what goes on with the growth of big government. This self-indulgence - we'll dish out money here, there, and Joe Blow over in Wainui gets up every morning and goes to a factory and pays for it. I think it's immoral."

Full Circle is also, Jones says, "a feminist novel." Well, of course, I tell him, you're the well-known feminist thinker who once said: "They [women] are all bloody mad. It is a question of whether you can keep them under-control-mad."

But they are, he counters. "The point is, we're all mad. I enjoy the madness of women, but I enjoy the madness of men as well." He has, deliberately, he emphasises, made the smartest, most sympathetic character in the book a woman.

Could he be mellowing? He doesn't think so. "Maturing might be a better word." He turned 60 last year, the day after the election, and says he rarely gets upset now. His "railing away, as I still do, is mainly out of habit."

Habit, as most of us know it, is not something that holds any great appeal for Jones. He loathes having to go to his office. "I had to come in here ... and I was beside myself with rage."

It's a beautiful day in Wellington and he'd much rather be talking to his head gardener about fuchsias and his 50 gloriously groomed acres. (In 1998 Jones' former gardener was found not guilty of poisoning $30,000 worth of trees, lawn and ivy.)

Habit, Jones-style, is a glass or two of red wine and a rationing of an Evelyn Waugh book once a month. He is a great admirer. "If you like Waugh, without wishing to sound as though I'm equating myself, then you'll like this book."

And habit seems to have meant fathering "millions of kids."

How many? "Oh, just millions ... I mean, they're everywhere." (The book blurb says he has seven children. They range in age from 35 years to two months.)

None of his millions of children live with him: "Oh well, that's another thing altogether. I'm not going to live with the buggers."

But they are all, once they turn 21, on the payroll to the tune of $50,000 a year. There is a catch: "I won't let them work.. I can't stop them, but they go off the payroll."

It's no big deal - you can't take it with you, he says. And getting rich and staying that way doesn't involve owning any unique skills other than tenacity.

A character in the novel, Tom, says at one point: "Most people like the idea of being rich yet never bother trying to be. Most of those who get there do so simply because they make the effort." And at another point: "Most people who make fortunes from scratch never stop wanting more. It may not be rational but that's the way it usually is."

These are his own observations, Jones says. "It's terribly easy to get rich."

At 21 he lay in a hospital bed, thinking he was going to die (he had Addison's disease, which was incurable before the advent of the steroids which saved him). "I had two pairs of underpants and one pair of pants," and he didn't know what to do with his life once he realised he was going to live. "I'm still trying to answer that question of what to do with myself. But in lieu of that I thought, 'I'll get rich quick so I have the liberty to decide at my leisure.'"

Nice leisure if you can get it. Last weekend he was about to head off to Sydney for a week to his home near Double Bay. He lives with "a girl," is enjoying life "enormously," and is threatening to write another satire - this time about the tourist industry. Backpackers and travel agents should be very scared indeed.