In the end, I worshipped Black Barbecue God, right up to the moment He ascended into a clear blue sky. But things didn’t start out like that. Ours was a hate-love relationship: from contempt to the familiar.
In a perfectly fine suburban laneway, Black Barbecue God arrived without fanfare to squat on wild grass beside the concrete footpath. The bordering houses were old, all of them weatherboard and weather-beaten, with wooden fencing like broken teeth. That barbecue belonged, and yet it did not.
It was big, with blunt Soviet-style lines, some strange weapon abandoned, left to leak its own particular radiation. It had dents and scratches; it had suffered in its years of service. A row of dull silver dials and the rest was grease-trap black—my future god glistened with the dreck of a thousand animal sacrifices. Its black wings, folded to either side, were (I imagined) the means by which it had descended into this neighbourhood realm. I was offended.
Why, though? Why did I care?
Because this wasn’t its rightful place, or so I’d thought. It didn’t belong; it was out of phase. So I cycled to one of our few remaining libraries—shelters for analogue citizens—and the only thing I did there was use a public computer to lodge a report. It wasn’t the first time. I’d had experience by then.
And just like every other time, weeks passed and nothing happened. I rode down the laneway most days and that oily obelisk remained unmoved. I was affronted: I felt that it was defying me. “Still here!” I’d yell at it. “Don’t you worry, mate. Someone’s coming for you.”
Yet as time passed I began to feel a certain admiration creeping in. I guess I appreciate resilience.
And I didn’t give up on the process. I made a call from a public phone outside the library.
“Your website says that once a report is lodged, you’ll take action to remove a dumped item within fourteen days, but you never do. It’s been way longer than that.”
“Oh no, what that means is we’ll act in fourteen days once it’s made it onto the list. Once it’s on the list then a pick-up is scheduled.”
“The site doesn’t say that at all.”
“Well, I’ll tell the web team to update that information.”
“And I want it noted that this barbecue is covered in grease and fat, and represents a significant fire hazard. It could hurt someone.”
“I’m going to add that to the file right now, sir.”
Turns out he did. What a smartarse.
I ride a road-worn Trek. I don’t remember where the bike came from. It’s a dusty blue, low-end model with too many gears. No carbon fibre frame for me, no Lycra second skin. I cycle in daylight and in the cooling dusk, and in the full night too. I know these streets so well by now that I can cruise without lights—maybe even with my eyes shut. My biggest danger is hitting a prowling cat or something wilder wandering down from the nearby reserve.
The streets are so quiet that passing cars feel like sly invaders. Their presence seems wrong somehow. I’m mostly alone on my noble patrols—I don’t see regular people (people, regularly) and when I do, they’re strangers to me, running in their gym gear, pushing their prams, walking their dogs, living their lives.
Understanding came slowly, as it so often does. Black Barbecue God, mute and immutable, helped me make sense of the things I’d seen. That, I think, was His true purpose, and true understanding began with the poster.
ALEX! COME HOME.
A4 and homemade, the poster had photos of Alex along with a phone number. It was fixed with bright orange tape to a wooden power pole near a footbridge.
Alex! Come Home. A call, or perhaps a prayer.
Alex is young and good-looking. He has cropped hair, lively eyes, and he’s wearing a nice-looking jacket against what might have been a winter’s day. In another picture, I can see some of the tattoo at the back of his neck. Looks like an infection of dark lines—a design gone bad. I can’t help scratching myself. In one picture he’s smiling. He looks happy.
Alex, if you see this, please come home.
This poster bothered me. It wasn’t just that Alex was missing, it was everything else I’d seen along the way, the things I’d been forgetting about.
I sleep in a quiet house surrounded by wire fencing and destined for demolition, in a suburb where old homes are being gentrified by young families willing to live with debt. I couldn’t deal with all that—I’d find the weight of such burdens crushing. The demolition has been delayed so I get to stay a little longer.
People around here like to nurture things: fruit and veggies, ripe for picking, and other things too. At the back of a nearby house there are bee hives, multi-level white boxes side by side; city living. I first noticed them from a trail up in the reserve where I walk or ride most days. I quickly fell into the habit of visiting them, of watching bees flying their bee lines.
I once read a book about the things that we spoil, and the person behind the book concluded that the best thing we could do for the planet was to leave it. To just go. It makes sense. The bees wouldn’t care and neither would anything else. I was reminded of a headline I’d seen, something like: Astronomy May Stop But The Universe Goes On. What a relief.
One afternoon, I was standing still and watching the bees when the hives’ owner came out. I couldn’t see her face—she was hidden inside her white beekeeper’s suit and looked like an astronaut of suburban space, armed with a smoking gun. A label on her suit read Lexia.
I said hello and she replied, “I don’t much care for strange men hanging around the back of my house. If anything happens to my bees, I’ll hunt you down.” I could tell from her voice that she was older than me.
“I just like watching them. They always seem to know what they’re doing.”
“That’s because they’re all instinct.” She started to smoke one of the hives. “Now they think it’s a bushfire so they gorge on honey to calm themselves down. I’ve noticed you paying them visits.”
“Well, it’s way better than TV. Not that I have a TV. I’d rather be outside anyway.”
She told me to stand back while she opened the hive and cut away some excess honeycomb, brushing away bees and dropping chunks into a small plastic tub. When she was finished, she came to me and offered me the tub. “Best medicine in the world. Take it with you and bring back my container when you’re done.”
I didn’t tell her that I lived close by. I worked my way through that honeycomb, a little every day, sucking on each piece until I was chewing gum. The honey was ridiculously rich—a pure amalgam of neighbourhood florae. I could almost feel it seeping through me and doing me good. I sat with Black Barbecue God and told Him all about it. I’d decided by then that I liked Him. I admired His brutalist style. His stoicism.
I had no high-tech, no means for a Chromecast binge, and I prefer the outdoors; lo-fi guy, that’s me. I laughed at a local church trying to mount a modern message with manual signage, the kind of sign where you could rearrange black plastic letters every Sunday. TWEET ALL AS YOU WANT TO BE TWEETED.
I patrolled from my half-way house. In the weeks and months before His arrival, I’d seen other things on my rides and eventually I’d reported them. I came to see it as a kind of civic duty. I couldn’t understand why anyone would dump anything in a car park or a laneway or anywhere else. It was the wrong kind of leaving.
These other things I’d seen—to begin with, I’d just watched them:
A Ford Laser GL, abandoned in a car park I like to ride through. There used to be an office building there but it’s gone now, so the unkept car park gets used for other things. The cars that come by night drive slowly and dim their lights; they never stay long and I don’t want to see who’s inside them, or what they’re doing.
The blue Laser sat there for weeks, untouched. The only things missing were its number plates. A nude plastic troll hung from the mirror inside, watching the world. There were cardboard boxes on the back seat.
And then the sleeping bag, left lying in the corner of an unloved park like a mouldering body no one cared to take away. I couldn’t grasp why anyone would dump something so useful. Fickle weather worried this hollow thing, an unsolved murder rotting in the bushes.
Then the Laser, unmolested for so long, was wrecked. All of its windows, smashed. Its doors and panels, beaten in. The troll, lying dead on the asphalt—glazed eyes, vacant grin. The cardboard boxes had been ripped open, their contents dumped and scattered, shirts and socks and underpants hanging from the branches of scrappy car park trees like sorry decorations. Someone’s life, eviscerated.
It was because of the Laser’s destruction that I began lodging my reports, so dutifully ignored. It seemed criminal, after all, to up-end and dump things like these.
The Laser and its belongings, the sleeping bag, and then Him.
It all came together when I saw Alex’s poster. Sweetened by honey, I sat beside Black Barbecue God and really thought about it all. I talked things through with Him. The smashed Laser, the scattered clothes, the sleeping bag—these things, I thought, had belonged to Alex. Something bad had happened to him and the evidence lay strewn across a mute suburb.
I’d missed the signs that Black Barbecue God now helped me to see. He hadn’t been defying me at all. He was a junkyard monolith, patiently waiting to guide me. He was, in fact, omnipotent. He knew me better than I knew myself. I was glad that He was still around.
If you have seen Alex or have ANY information please call...
And so, one day, I did.
“Hello? I’m calling about Alex.”
The voice was a woman’s. “Alex. Alex?”
“I saw the poster. I don’t know what’s happened to him, but I’ve seen things around the place. There’s an old Ford, a sleeping bag, clothes all over the place, and a barbecue in a laneway. They all just appeared for no reason, and no one’s coming to get them. I think they’re all somehow connected to him.”
There was a pause. I waited because I needed to know.
Then she said, “You know what, I think you’re right. I think they’re signs too. I guess we use what we see around us to make sense of things.”
Another beat. She was thinking. Then she asked me, “Will you help me find him? I need to bring him home.”
“I can try,” I told her.
Black Barbecue God had the last laugh. When two council workers in high-vis vests finally came to haul Him away, one of them knelt beside my greasy god with a Zippo lighter in hand. His mate took out his phone to record the event for posterity, or at least for shits and giggles. My best guess is that they’d seen my claim of a fire hazard on the paperwork and thought they’d put it to the test—to make a fool of me.
What no one knew was that Black Barbecue God still had a gas bottle inside Him. At some point it had started to leak and now His magical form was filled with invisible power. The Zippo’s wheel turned, spark begat flame, and in a dazzling burst of Pentecostal energy, Black Barbecue God soared into a perfect sky—for a few glorious seconds anyway.
As if he’d lit his own monster fart, Zippo Man somersaulted three times backwards and—despite burns to his face and hands—became a YouTube sensation. Transformed in His heavenly flight, Black Barbecue God came tumbling down in pieces and, finally, was taken away for eternal rest in landfill. All Hail Black Barbecue God!
I wasn’t there to see it but I watched the video and went back to the laneway. The grass and pavement were scorched, proof that He was once there—that He’d shown me the way and then left me to it. I told Lexia all about it as we sat in her garden and drank tea. She gave me a jar of fresh honey and some homemade bread and told me to keep eating. My Doctor Lexia.
And Lexia lets me use her phone. Every few days I call Amanda—Amanda, that’s her name—and we compare signs. We’ve talked a few times now. I forgot her name once so now I say it whenever I ride, my echo on wheels. Amanda, Amanda. Amanda wants me to go see her. We talk about Alex. About bringing him home.
I think the sound of my voice comforts her.