Why on earth was I reading about Winston Peters? Who was Winston Peters to me? This gadfly I’d never heard of, this radical-centrist Maori activist politician hustling for issues I’d never encountered, half a world away? And I mean that literally, by the way: there are 8,153 miles of land and ocean between my old apartment on Roscoe Street in Chicago and Peters’s home district of Tauranga, on the Bay of Plenty in northern New Zealand. A nation so discreet that mid-1990s reports of a brewing race war, replete with terrorist threats and car attacks and fears that a spark could ignite a full-on antipodean Belfast, barely surfaced in the northern hemisphere. But I’d seen an article, somewhere, and the unlikeliness of it all made Winston Peters a great talking point, I thought, if I should happen to encounter a Kiwi at a party.
At this particular party, in December 1997, there were two. Scott and Nomi, both redheads with rare accents of jumbled vowels, stood on the wood-frame back landing, pausing to catch their breath in mid-retreat from a couple of years in high-finance London—and, it emerged, a couple of years as a couple. They were on a long layover, visiting friends before returning to Auckland, and they were amicable enough, chatting together over their plastic cups. Wouldn’t they be floored that some dude in Chicago, in dumb, thick America, could be interested in the ins and outs of their homeland? I had my card—I played it: “So, um, hey. What’s this Winston Peters guy all about?”
I understood my mistake instantly. Both faces scrunched, both heads reared backward. Scott sighed, then nodded. “Ahhh… Winston Peters.” Obligingly, he offered a brief Petersology, but clearly he wasn’t so much impressed as unsettled. Lesson learned: coming to a party armed with quiz-night insignifica doesn’t mean you should necessarily lock and load. If I’d been the one interloping at an Auckland house party—Hey, that alderman of yours in Chicago, Bobby Rush: bit of a bomb-thrower, is he?—I might have inadvertently sprayed my host with a mouthful of Steinlager.
At least I wasn’t wearing my Chills T-shirt. Because no sooner had I stopped asking after New Zealand’s legislators than I became a full-on pest, ticking off a laundry list of the bands I’d caught at Lounge Ax, the humid indie-rock club lit entirely by Christmas lights that stood just across Lincoln Avenue from the alley where John Dillinger had been shot to death. The Chills. The Bats. Bailter Space. The Jean-Paul Sartre Experience. Straitjacket Fits had left the biggest impression of all, midway through a cardiologically punishing...
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