Steve Braunias found life on the road was rock 'n' roll without the rock 'n' roll. Photo / Alan Gibson
Steve Braunias found life on the road was rock 'n' roll without the rock 'n' roll. Photo / Alan Gibson
A professional speaker? A stand-up comedian? Steve Braunias considers a career change and turns to a self-appointed life coach for help.
I had everything I needed for my epic speaking tour of the South Island - no sleep until Invercargill, where I didn't sleep a wink. Bus tickets. Black suit in its dry-cleaning plastic wrap. Shoe-shine kit. David Beckham aftershave. Panadol. A4 paper and notebooks and a nice pen I found on the pavement. And the promise of sound advice and continual motivation from a friend, who regarded himself as my speaking coach.
He took the role seriously. So did I. I write for a living, solitary and protected in a basement office in my home in Te Atatu; public speaking is an occasional terror in my life, and I need all the help I can get. Mostly, I really enjoy it. It's fun, it's instant. Sometimes (an arts festival in Nelson, a medical conference in Hamilton) it's death.
The tour had taken months to plan. It was five shows in four cities in six days. South, heading north: fly to Invercargill, fly home six days later from Christchurch, with three leisurely InterCity bus journeys in between. All expenses paid, even a per diem ($100 for two days) in Dunedin. Speaking fee at most events, $250. The Bay City Motor Lodge, a hotel called Kelvin - it was rock 'n' roll without the rock 'n' roll.
Half of the trip came from invitation and the other half from a kind of begging. Three of the cities were hosting writers festivals, or seasons, and found things for me to do - on a panel, as solo guest, as chairman. I'm good like that. You can take me anywhere, and I'll behave according to festival need.
As a journalist, satirist and author of six books, I've appeared at arts things in Whanganui, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Featherston, Hamilton, Auckland, Wellington, Nelson, Christchurch, Melbourne, London; there was also a strange visit to Kapiti Island, where I spoke in a hut alongside Lloyd Jones, and a loud debate in a hay shed somewhere in Hawkes Bay with Joe Bennett, Jim Hopkins and Raybon Kan. I hated that one.
But I loved most of the rest, and wrote a column last year about my experiences. The column was syndicated to newspapers in Invercargill and Timaru. I placed a hint. I begged. I wrote: "Please invite me to your city." Invercargill's magnificent Dan Davin Literary Foundation answered the call, and so did a curious cult called the Timaru Horizon Dinner Group.
The dates were set for a week in May. By chance, a public speaking agency had got in touch just before the tour, and asked whether I'd like to join their books. They'd heard good things. The stakes were being raised. Corporate fees pay about 10 times the amount offered by arts festivals.
But it wasn't just the money that appealed. I carried a secret, and shared it with only a very few people - including my newly self-appointed coach, who had gone to the trouble of printing a business card. It had a single word on it: Coach.
The truth was, I'd already been thinking about doing something new and radical with my professional life. I'd been wondering about it, but not doing anything about it. No research, no study, no actual attempt to get the ball rolling. I'd talked about it with chilled-out entertainers Te Radar and Michele A'Court. They were both really encouraging. That was nice, although I only told them half the truth.
I said to them I wanted to become a host and speaker on the corporate events and after-dinner circuit. I told Coach the rest of the secret. I had notions of becoming a stand-up comedian.
A warning at Invercargill's Kelvin Hotel.
"I think you could do it," said Coach.
I said, "Am I funny, though? And are stand-up comedians actually funny? I find them a drag. Sometimes I think I've no sense of humour. I hate 7 Days."
"Calm down. You'll be fine. Plus I'm here any time of day or night to talk you through it."
"Really?"
"I'm the Coach," he said.
Invercargill loomed bright and warm on the Southland plains, and I set off for a long walk as soon as I arrived. I wanted to see the lack of sights. I wanted air, sea, silence. I'd heard about a lagoon walk, and asked the manager at the Kelvin Hotel for directions. He was new in town. Worse, he was Australian. He said: "What lagoon?"
I walked out the front door, and a man called my name. He introduced himself as Phil McCarthy from the Southland Times. He set me in the right direction. I walked for two hours in and around the nearby estuary, which runs alongside the Pleasure Bay lagoon; it was beautiful, stunning, a riot of water birds and wetland, stretching out towards Bluff. It felt intoxicating to stand on the edge of things, at the end of the civilised road - that way lies the madness of Antarctica.
A white heron set itself among ducks. Its long, thin legs and blindingly snow-white wings scattered the quackers.
There was a row of cottages on the opposite side of a bank; one particular house, eggshell blue, held my fascination. Earlier that day I was shown a kind of compound on Oki Rd, which runs parallel to Invercargill's loud, crashing Oreti Beach. One of the houses has a room entirely made of mirrors. Who lives there? And who lives in that watery paradise in the cottage painted eggshell blue overlooking Pleasure Bay's ducks, geese, stilts, gulls, blue herons and white herons?
The mysteries persisted. A woman called the organisers of the Invercargill event and said, "Tell Steve that the Southern Swede is coming. He'll know who I am."
I had no idea who that meant. I met her after I gave my speech. I had no idea who she was, but it seemed possible from our brief conversation that she was insane.
By that time, however, I had also pretty much taken leave of my wits. I was traumatised, drowning, drained of blood. The speech was an absolute flop. The event at Paddington's was sold out, with 40 people on rows of chairs inside a snug, very narrow bar, including one woman who came by mistake - she thought I was someone else with a similar name who gave expert advice on parenting. She was a good sport about it and, like everyone else, seemed to suffer in silence.
The speech was a kind of call to arms, a challenge to resist a new age of stupidity that I think has swept through New Zealand. It was a variation of a speech I had recently given in Hamilton, to loud acclaim; but in Invercargill, it was a fizzer.
And yet the fizzer had zingers. At one point I jovially referred to Invercargill man Louis Crimp, the elderly Act Party donor famous for trying it on with a TV3 reporter, on camera. I hooted: "Are you here tonight, Louis? There are some ladies in the audience!"
The silence was sepulchral. It was the silence of the grave. I was in that grave, upright, with my eyes open: I was told afterwards that poor old Louis had recently died.
Everyone was very nice, and as soon as I finished they fled in an orderly fashion. I crawled off to a bar at the Kelvin. The second I walked in, a woman fell off her bar stool, and smashed about six glasses. Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney sang their horrible Ebony and Ivory duet on a large-screen TV. This was hell, and I tossed and turned in the fires of my shame and humiliation all night long in bed.
I got up at 6am and went for a walk downtown. It was very cold and pitch black. A man on a bicycle stopped at a red light. Why? The closest traffic was in Gore.
I caught the bus to Dunedin, and told Coach what had happened. He replied, "I told you a Plan B was critical. You've got to get that locked down soonest. Put Invercargill behind you now. That's what Guy Montgomery would do."
I aspired to be Guy Montgomery - someone merely lame. I had died in Invercargill. A nice person from the Dan Davin Foundation said, "Oh no, you were fine! People in Southland are reserved, that's all."
But they weren't in the Kelvin that night, and they deserved better at Paddington's. The bus rolled north, through tiny Edendale, where Janet Frame once lived; the country was beautiful to behold, and the cheese rolls at a roadside cafe did even more to lift my spirits.
I sent Coach a hopeful email. He replied, "That's the attitude! You can't kill every set. It's about learning and moving on, as Te Radar well knows. Drop some sweet jibes about how backwards the folk are in Invercargill. That's A-material right there."
It felt good to have Coach in my corner. But he had such terrible ideas.
The event in Dunedin went swimmingly well from beginning to end. I was alongside Otago Daily Times columnist Lisa Scott, and we were chaired by crime writer Vanda Symon. Their company meant I wasn't given room to sail into windy, boring monologues, and the chat was lively, playful, now and then coherent. People laughed and laughed. It was such a good sound.
The art gallery show of about 80 people was sold out. I could tell at once that the audience were in a good mood, including a woman in the front row who stood and gave a dramatic thumbs-up before anyone had said a word. Any suspicions that she was possibly insane were strengthened when she took to the floor, and made a speech. She said she wanted to be New Zealand's next Margaret Mahy, but had trouble reading and writing. Then she wept. I saw her later. She said: "My brain's scrambled!"
In Invercargill, I'd given a comic reading from my book, Madmen, about attending a very sad public meeting held by the Act Party. No one laughed. I decided against reading it in Dunedin but when the session finished, a man approached the stage and said, "That part in Madmen about attending the Act Party meeting - that was a classic!"
I told Coach about Dunedin. He emailed, "Proud of you and your resilience. Keep it rolling."
But my mood was dampened by a review. Someone had posted it on a library website. They liked the show, but saw fit to remark that my shirt was "rumpled". Would they do that to a woman? I felt really upset about it, took it as a slight. Listen, the bus got into Dunedin an hour before the show, I rushed to the hotel to unpack and shower and change - I looked at the shirt, and got out the ironing board, but then I looked at my watch. No one, I thought, will mind.
Dunedin sunrise.
It didn't quite ruin my weekend. One of the great joys of appearing at a writers' festival is meeting other writers, and it was my privilege in Dunedin, Christchurch and, later, in Auckland to spend time with author Helen Macdonald and Guardian journalist Nick Davies.
My time with Helen was in daylight hours. Nick was strictly after dark, in various assorted bars of repute and disrepute. Together we got extremely rumpled.
I liked Helen and Nick at once. They were funny and very, very alert, and I missed them between cities.
In Christchurch, I chaired Helen's hour-long session. A good chairman says little and keeps out of the way. The guest is the star, and Helen is exactly that. Her book, H Is For Hawk, has sold over 250,000 copies, and she may well be in possession of genius.
"Despite what people say," she wrote on her Twitter account, "writers are bloody lovely people to hang out with. I have made some Good Friends this week."
I felt the same. Hopefully, she counted me as one of these Good Friends, although I haven't heard from her since.
Dunedin blazed with a red, volcanic sunrise when I took the morning bus to Timaru. It was another journey of wonderful scenery and poignant towns, familiar to me from the years my father lived in Fairlie.
I'd visit and, as soon as I got in the door, he'd demand we go on a road trip. The lakes, the dams, the pubs with giant trout mounted on the walls ... I wrote a column about one of those trips after he died. I read it that night during my speech in Timaru.
It was a slow, rather mordant piece, but the ladies of uncertain age who belonged to the Timaru Horizons Dinner Group took to it with enthusiasm. They were a wonderful audience, the best of the trip. They laughed and laughed. They were so jolly and warm.
"Oh," said one of the members, "we drink a hell of a lot."
It was held at the Timaru Tearooms in Caroline Bay. There was an excellent meal, and charming company. I wanted it never to end. I loved every minute in Timaru. A highlight was another lagoon walk, when I headed south around the cliffs of Dashing Rocks, past the milky, bloody smell of an abattoir, and then down into a long stretch of coast beside Washdyke Lagoon. On one side, the sea beat itself into a green fury on the sand; on the other, water birds crowded the placid lagoon. I walked for four hours in this wonderland.
The next morning, I ordered two pies from Timaru's justly famous May's Pies Bakery - nearly as good as the blue cod and Bluff oysters at Dunedin's Best Cafe, where they also serve white bread - and took my final bus trip, to Christchurch.
Elated by lagoons and pies and laughter, I wrote to Coach about the Timaru show.
"This is huge news," he replied. "I'm so glad to hear that you have built up to a triumphant peak after that difficult start. What do you think the key has been?"
I said that I thought the key was I sucked in Invercargill, and didn't elsewhere, yet.
His response: "Yeah, that's a valuable lesson. There is never just one talk. The audience is the talk. Understand first, talk second. And other aphorisms."
Who was Coach, really? Why did he talk in riddles? Sometimes I wondered about him, and questioned our relationship. But he was so positive.
By the day of my event in Christchurch, I had come down with a terrible cold, and spent all day sleeping in my sumptuous hotel room at the Heritage.
Coach wrote, "Use that cold as a weapon, a source of zingers. Set it up early and then come back to it regularly. 'When I was writing Madmen I sometimes had a cold - but not like this one!' And so on."
What? Ill, feverish, aching, I was nevertheless able to discern that once again his advice was useless.
It pointed to a dichotomy. In intellectual terms, Coach was a moron. But as a motivator and source of support, he was godlike, up there with life coach Tony Robbins.
I got out of bed. I ironed my shirt to within an inch of its life. I climbed into my suit, and drank a jug of boiled water. As I turned to leave for the event, Coach sent an email: "You're a professional. This is easy for you."
And it felt like it during the happy hour downstairs at the Heritage, where a sell-out crowd of 40 gathered. People didn't laugh and laugh but they laughed.
As chairman, Christchurch writer Philip Matthews guided the conversation in intelligent patterns. Afterwards, I met a man who was more than possibly insane, and also Jo Malcolm and her mother, Anne, both delightful. I wished Jo's husband, Roger Sutton, had come, too. I was keen to meet the devil.
Food, shoes and loved ones on Braunias' motel bed.
The tour was over. There was one last hurrah, a few days later, when I appeared alongside satirist David Slack at an event at the Auckland Writers' Festival. We attracted a sell-out audience of about 400. They laughed and laughed and laughed. I looked into the crowd and hoped to see Coach, but he'd left it too late to buy a ticket.
There was an email from him the next day. "Congrats on a great tour," he wrote. "Let's debrief at some point and get you straight back out there."
What to do? I'm doubtful about my ability as a professional speaker (do I really want to be some kind of phoney, welcoming delegates to their annual conferences?) and even less sure whether I have the necessary wit and fortitude to do stand-up. It's so peaceful in my basement, writing and napping; outside is the good cheer of Timaru, but also the unholy quiet of Invercargill. I like things that test my nerve. I hate feeling really bad about myself. I love being onstage. I'm a nervous wreck at social gatherings, awkward, self-conscious, boring.
Public speaking is writing out loud. I think I've decided what to do.
