The sound of crashing glass the morning after is a New Zealand classic, a music that strikes a loud, instantly familiar chord in every city and province throughout the land – I heard all of New Zealand gather at my door last Friday morning when I tipped a box of bottles into the rubbish bin after hosting a dozen or so enthusiastic drinkers on Thursday night. The gathering was unusual, a low-culture event that marked a significant event in my low-culture life. I had launched my latest book at a bookstore that night and invited the hardcore back to mine. But its individual components didn’t matter. It belonged to the great common mass of New Zealanders having got plastered.
The sound of crashing glass the morning after filled me with joy and nationalistic pride. They briefly competed with a dreadful hangover. I was in pyjamas and sneakers at the back of the house beneath the overhead deck where I store the recycling bin and the bin destined for the tip. It’s a dark, cool place, ideal for my collection of hanging vines in pots and painted tins, suspended from hooks and in rows on raised planks. My best self resides in nature. But the racket of bottles of beer and wine and spirits, mingled with the softer thud of cans, returned me to my rightful place as a representative of the best of human nature.
The sound of crashing glass the morning after is the noise of teenage parties, student parties, adults-only parties, birthday parties, 21st parties, housewarming parties, flat parties, leaving parties – the glue that holds it all together is alcohol, which gets such bad press these days. The disease of alcoholism is a cancer.
I walked past Auckland Central City Library on Saturday night and was stunned to see about 20 people camped outside, a whole community of the homeless, two in pup tents, the rest lying on the footpath or sharing a bench seat, drinking. It was a cold night. Two sleepers on the footpath had bare feet. Alcohol stirred the embers of the ashes of their lives. It was a desperately sad sight but the plain fact of the matter is that for much of New Zealand, alcohol is good fun.
The sound of crashing glass the morning after joined the chorus of the exact same glassy roar heard every weekend in every suburban street and out in the sticks. I heard it each morning recently when I slept at my brother’s house in Kawhia: it’s next door to the town pub. The best I ever heard it was when I stayed the night in a house at Lake Brunner. There had been a massive party, a West Coast gathering of the feral, bogan tribes, and the morning after was a long crescendo of thousands of bottles tipped into a metal skip. The lake was as smooth and shiny as glass.
The sound of crashing glass the morning after my book launch was so satisfying, so resonant of good times throughout the land, that I stood where I was for a minute or so among the trailing vines of wandering willie and blood leaf, and soaked up the pleasure of it. I thought of Kawhia and Lake Brunner and the great tradition of bleary Kiwi party hosts picking up bottles all across the country, and then I thought about the crew who came back to mine, loaded down with lager and pinot and chardonnay. My partner had thought ahead and ordered in $40 of hot chips. We had everything we needed. The Velvet Underground LP Loaded got cranked up on the record player. One guest fell over. Another guest smashed a vase. Everyone was drinking. Everything was heading towards the dawn chorus of glass and happiness.
