After her wedding service in 2003, Mandy Sayer stopped traffic. Or at least the musicians leading her and her new husband, Louis Nowra, through the streets of Kings Cross did. \u201cSaxophones wailing, tambourines jingling, drums booming, even managing to pick up one or two rough sleepers along the way,\u201d she writes in her latest memoir, No Dancing In The Lift.<\/p>\n
Three years earlier, in 2000, the same scenario had played out at the funeral of her jazz musician father, Gerry. The congregation followed the hearse down Darlinghurst Road, \u201call playing percussion instruments to the saxophonist\u2019s fast blues,\u201d she tells Guardian Australia.<\/p>\n
Important occasions require a band of musicians.<\/p>\n
Mandy Sayer\u2019s wedding day in 2003 in Kings Cross, Sydney. Photograph: Roslyn Sharp<\/p>\n
Gerry believed he and his daughter were so artistically alike because she was conceived after he had swallowed a block of hash. \u201cHe always fondly referred to me as his hash baby,\u201d Sayers says. He couldn\u2019t read or write: \u201cHe could write his name in shaky capital letters, but that was about it. But he was a brilliant storyteller.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gerry pursued his music with evangelical fervour, practising for hours every day, sacrificing family and \u201crelinquishing the bright and shiny chance at uncomplicated unhappiness for the longer odds of creative contentment,\u201d as Sayer writes in her new memoir, which is addressed directly to Gerry. As a little girl, Sayer would sit between his legs as he played Mingus or Coltrane, \u201clightly tapping against my skull, literally drumming your rhythms into my head. In the beginning, to me, music and language were one. I heard stories in saxophones, and syncopation in sentences.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think any artist has to make a choice,\u201d Sayer says now. \u201cHow much are you willing to risk? How important is it to you? What are you willing to not have in your life?\u201d<\/p>\n
Mandy and Gerry Sayer performing in Chinatown, Sydney, 1980. Photograph: Supplied by Mandy Sayer<\/p>\n
Sayer has managed to achieve an artistic career that creates great beauty from hard times. Her parents separated by the time she was eight, after Gerry realised during an LSD trip that he had married the wrong woman. Although she still saw her father occasionally, he was largely absent until she sought him out as a teenager: \u201cHe was so wonderful and warm, I kept returning to him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sayer, her brother, Gene, and sister, Lisa, were left with their mother, Betty, who was descending into chronic alcoholism and entered relationships with dangerous men; one of them was so violent the family had to go on the run. Sayer\u2019s childhood was spent on the move, living in rooms in pubs and dosshouses.<\/p>\n
\u201cBetty\u2019s inability to express her rage directly resulted in an extended performance of passive-aggressive behaviour,\u201d she writes. \u201cBy day, she worked as a live-in housekeeper and nanny; by night, she got drunk and capriciously threw herself into the arms of a bookie, then a sports journalist, then an undertaker.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was so beautiful and sad,\u201d Sayer says of her mother. \u201cI used to write poetry daily to cheer her up, and it worked, even if only for a few hours.\u201d<\/p>\n
No Dancing in the Lift is the fourth in a quartet of memoirs; there was also Velocity (2005), which covered Sayer\u2019s childhood, and The Poets Wife (2014), which spanned the 10 years she spent with African American poet Yusef Komunyakaa, as he grew in fame and won a Pulitzer.<\/p>\n
But her first, Dreamtime Alice (1998), which won the National Biography award, covered the three itinerant years in the early 80s she and Gerry spent busking in New York, New Orleans and Colorado. She was 21 and he was 62 when they started; she would tap dance to the beat of his drums. Father and daughter \u201calmost turned breaking the law into a performance art: busking in New York City without a permit and dodging debt collectors by frequently moving hotels.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018I know how to hustle on the streets of New York City\u2019 \u2026 Mandy Sayer today. Photograph: Supplied by Mandy Sayer<\/p>\n
This period of her life \u201ccertainly made me the person I am today,\u201d she says now. \u201cWhenever someone in the industry is trying to mess with me, I\u2019m thinking, \u2018Look, you\u2019ve got no chance. I know how to hustle on the streets of New York City.\u2019 You cannot grift a grifter.\u201d<\/p>\n
For decades, Kings Cross was Sayer\u2019s habitat; she was backlit, even in the daytime, by the garish fluorescent neon signs on every storefront, showgirls, strippers, eccentrics, grifters walking in the pulsating streets. \u201cIt was theatre,\u201d she says, \u201cand a diverse, accepting community.\u201d Sayer was an ethereal figure wandering among all this with her long blonde hair, her flowing vintage dresses, and large picture hats. The now defunct Bourbon and Beefsteak bar \u201cwas my living room because it was just across the street\u201d.<\/p>\n
Gone now, all of it gone. Even Sayers has defected \u201cover the border\u201d to Darlinghurst.<\/p>\n
Mandy and Gerry Sayer performing during Mardi Gras, on Bourbon Street, 1982. Photograph: Supplied by Mandy Sayer<\/p>\n
For years, Gerry lived in single rooms above pubs in The Rocks, with his beers, weed and flutters on the horses. When he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, Sayer became his devoted carer. He moved between the hospice and her home; she would carefully roll his joints the way she had been instructed from an early age \u2013 trying to recreate, she writes, \u201cthe many beer gardens of my childhood\u201d. In sickness, he was sometimes angry and belligerent, and sometimes his hilarious, warm, affectionate self. After a Lear-like outburst at a nurse, Sayer told him that being terminally ill did not give him the right \u201cto act like an arsehole\u201d.<\/p>\n
He was a flamboyant sight at the hospice, wearing his daughter\u2019s bright pyjamas and her Chinese satin embroidered robe, which made him look like a \u201cwise old sage\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe enjoyed shocking people out of their inertia,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
He had his opinions on her suitors, too. His face lit up when she told him she was going to dinner with Nowra, a writer, playwright, screenwriter and librettist. Nowra was married to someone else at the time; nevertheless, Sayer overheard Gerry admonishing Nowra during a visit to the hospice: \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with my daughter? Why haven\u2019t you made a pass at her?\u201d<\/p>\n
Sayer and Nowra had been introduced to produce an anthology of Kings Cross. They were drinking wine one afternoon, with the photocopied excerpts laid out in rows on her living room floor, when suddenly they were kissing. \u201cHis head was lying against an excerpt of George Johnson\u2019s Clean Straw For Nothing, my arm elbowed an extract of Aunts Up The Cross by Robin Dalton,\u201d she writes. \u201cSoon we were lying on Patrick White, Betty Roland and Kenneth Slessor, paper sheets beneath us instead of cotton ones.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her father \u201cknew Louis would be a good person to be with me after his death. He knew that Louis was a good man and he wouldn\u2019t hurt me,\u201d Sayers says. Later, she texts me: \u201cAll [Gerry] really wanted me to do is to keep writing and being myself. He was concerned that some arsehole would come along and interfere with that process.\u201d<\/p>\n
The cover of No Dancing in the Lift by Mandy Sayer. Photograph: Transit Lounge Publishing<\/p>\n
Sayer was swimming in the sea when the voice of the book came to her. \u201cI could hear the rhythms of the prose, and I could hear the point of view, which was me talking to him. I was following his voice, a bit like the Pied Piper.\u201d Then she found the memoirist\u2019s mother lode when she was clearing out a storage unit: \u201cI\u2019d forgotten that I\u2019d stored every scrap of paper, every coaster and bar bill I had written on and put in this box. My diaries, medical bills, appointment books. It was this great gift.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sayer realises now, \u201cone way or another\u201d, that Gerry is threaded through all of her work, memoir and fiction. Though he couldn\u2019t read or write, his \u201csublime\u201d storytelling had \u201cinspired my imagination\u201d. He had unwittingly influenced her work with his \u201cflair for improvisation, both in music and in life\u201d.<\/p>\n
No Dancing in the Lift is not a grief memoir, as such. There is enough distance for absurdities and honesty to shine through. \u201cHe was a very funny man,\u201d Sayer says. \u201cSometimes when I was writing, it was making me laugh so much that I scared my chihuahua. I almost felt euphoric. And I realised, it was because I was spending every day with my father.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After her wedding service in 2003, Mandy Sayer stopped traffic. Or at least the musicians leading her and…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":209988,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4740,50],"class_list":{"0":"post-209987","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115168264019032634","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}