Chapter 1

Light the fuse

Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress published 20240706

Fuse Lit: Heard once, playing on a Te Kūiti fish shop radio, circa late 1950s, despite the earliest album recording date being 1964, with no earlier, single catalogued—much less Light the Fuse  itself. Co-songwriter Dorsey Burnette, pictured. image The Rockabilly Years | album Motown Records

Light the fuse, step back, we heard the straw boss say
We’ve got to save the lives of a hundred men today
Dorsey Burnette – Joe Osborne

Given Hutchins’ deterioration, it risks seeming a cruel question. Judging, however, he’ll welcome it, Cimino asks his old primary school friend—and author of thirty published books:  

Hutch, are you currently writing?

His eyes light up. Laboriously, walking-frame aided he retrieves a single sheet of paper, then watches his friend as he begins to read. Several precious conversations are running in parallel—Hutchins had named the occasion the Winstone Road Reunion, for the suburbanPuketāpapa, Makaurau (Mount Roskill, Auckland) house they’d shared in their late teens. This is the first time the four have been face-to-face in 59 years, and Jane is meeting Hutchins’ lifelong soulmate Jenny, and famously.

If you’re not going to read that…

Silently beseeching the patience of Hutchin’s enduring best friend ‘Russ’, Cimino insists,

No, no, Hutch—I’m enjoying it!

Resuming, Cimino is thrilled to read renewed proof of the power of Hutchins’ prose. He is vividly reminded of the first time he’d heard his friend’s writing narrated, on public-broad­cast radio, and again is instantly transported back to his Te Kūiti childhood.

In the mid-1960s scene his solitary page so sublimely describes, Hutchins is phoned by his friend Skerman, and summoned to the town’s record store to listen to a just-released single. The artistry with which he describes how—in those 2:45 minutes—his musical axis is seismically altered, underscores why he has a bookshelf of titles to his credit.

Cimino is ebullient. Hutchins says, of the passion for music he and Skerman had shared for a lifetime:

Pete would phone me every couple of weeks, and we’d talk about music for a good hour.

In that moment, the room is achingly bereft. Peter Skerman’s death two years ago had knocked the stuffing out of each of them. At Skerman’s send-off, they’d vowed to confound geography and catch up again in Hamilton “sooner than later”— facilitated by the fixed-wing connection Te Kūiti expatriate Russell Young maintains with his home in Blenheim, and a serviceable car kept at the aerodrome of his birthplace.

Two days after the funeral, Cimino—never a fast thinker— had experienced an epiphany. A long-harboured notion of ordering some of his previous 17-year’s climate-action writing into online-book form had suddenly assumed a semi-coherent structure. A speculative novel, Cimino had judged, would be liberating and his best shot at helping to provoking the Climate Polycrisis Mega­mobilisation. It would be dedicated to Skerman, whose limitless charisma and ability seemed have imbued and improved all those fortunate to consider him a close friend. A month of manic writing had ensued, only to be overwhelmed by two tumultuous years, and a different moonshot. Then, with the—probably, final—poignant visit of his long-since Californian, little big-sister, the Skerman commemoration could be deferred no longer.

Six weeks on, Cimino phones Hutchins to tell him that the page he’d had the honour of previewing has gifted him his own opening chapter—uploaded this bitterly cold, azure winter’s morning. Serendipitously, Cimino had only recently revisited his own Te Kūiti musical revelation: Pre-teen, as he’d stood at the rear bumper of the family car, parked at the doorway of the not-the-no-relation-Coles Fish Shop, but the other of the town’s two, he was transfixed by the heroic ballad ringing out from the fish-shop radio. He’d carried the tune and lyrics of its call-to-action chorus in his head for 66 years without ever hearing it again, or encountering another soul who had. A few days earlier, while citing it to his sister as one of two pieces of music to serially elude him online, Cimino had suddenly found it—revealing, in the process, the straw /store mondegreen that had gremlined his search.

One heartwarming hour later, Cimino farewells Hutchins:

Light the fuse, step back!

 

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