by Alice Pung
Barry Garner likes to tell people he works in finance and advertising for a living (Barry cleans banks and delivers pamphlets). Bruno Lettieri was his TAFE creative writing teacher. Barry and Bruno have been friends for twenty years.
Barry Garner
When I was 42 years old, I enrolled in a creative writing course in St Albans TAFE. That time, I was working six days a week at the Lost Dogs Home driving an animal ambulance. I hadn’t been in a classroom since I was fifteen. I walked in, and there was this little ball of enthusiasm at the front. Bruno was very different from the men who taught me in secondary school and very different from the men I worked with over the years – he had a gentleness that I had never seen in a man before. Three weeks into the class, I had to tell him, “Since I’ve been doing these classes, my life’s changing.”
There’s something about being in a writing class that supercharges the getting-to- know-you process. I reckon two writing classes is about the equivalent to fifteen first dates. You get all the bull and shadowboxing out of the way pretty quick.
It was a bit of a problem when I kept on re-enrolling. It got to the point where Bruno said, “You are not to enrol anymore, go away!” By that stage we were such good friends he could say that. I know lots of people who have been in his class and they all have the same experience. It’s a pretty intoxicating thing. But he sat me down and said, ‘Look, you’re at the point now where you can start motivating yourself.’
I was diagnosed with bipolar in 1991 just after the death of my grandmother. She had lived with me for the last ten years of her life because I was a single parent. When she died, I took it pretty hard and got depressed. It sort of went on and on and there was something not quite right. I’ve always had it but it just wasn’t given a label – back then people called it bad nerves. I had a breakdown at eighteen. I’d been prescribed some Valium, took an overdose and went to the hospital. That was a very bad experience. In those days, it was, “you’re an idiot, man up.”
One day Bruno rang to ask me to speak to his writing class in Sunbury and I was in the middle of a very bad episode. I said, “Aw mate, I can’t write anything, I can’t think about anything except being depressed.” And he said, “Why don’t you write about it?” That night, I sat down and wrote a poem about manic depression. I turned up to class and read it.
Caz was sitting in the room. She has bipolar too. She got my address off Bruno and wrote to me, so I wrote back, and I suppose this went on for a couple of months. We fell in love swapping letters.
Eventually we met up at the uni on a Sunday afternoon. When she turned up, I thought, this is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I just want to kiss her once, because as soon as I open my mouth I know I’ll stuff it up. So I threw my arms around her and gave her this great big kiss – I don’t know who got the biggest
surprise! I have never in my life kissed a woman on the first date. I think that was because of the fact that we had exchanged those letters.
When we got married Bruno gave Caz away, because her family live in England. It was the first time I have ever seen him stuck for words. When the Reverend got to the part where he said, “And who gives this woman away to be married?” Bruno just stood there! I’m looking at him saying, ‘well, come on big fella!’ and he goes, “I…I… I do!”
He’s part of the family. I’ve been hospitalised a couple of times. The first person to visit me in hospital is Caz. The second is Bruno. Bruno is not a psychiatrist but he’s just taught me little things to help me get through. He’s taught me to always dangle a carrot, always have something on the horizon that you’re working towards, even if you feel like you can’t do it now. In recent years it’s been helping me get my book, Haloes in the Windscreen, published.
I’m a firm believer that if you feel strongly about someone, you should let them know. My father died when I was 13, and he never said to me I love you. So I spent a lot of years wondering if he did. I carried that around like a little secret envelope. And Bruno opened up the envelope and put a stamp on it.
Bruno Lettieri
Barry was in the first creative writing class I taught. He wrote me a letter a few weeks in. He started with ‘Dear Professor.’ It takes the piss out of me but it’s very endearing too, because I work in a uni where every second person is a professor and I’m just the TAFE literacy teacher.
He kept re-enrolling for the course. It got to the point where I said, “You could have got a degree by now with the amount of times you’ve re-enrolled in this class!” So Barry started coming back as part of our little double act. I’d get Barry along to talk to my new students about how writing can provide a wonderful telescope to your own world.
People always loved his stuff. I have taken him to people training to be integration aids, the lowest level ESL classes, the naughtiest VCAL kids – and Barry talks to them all: it’s the unaffectedness of his voice, a voice that doesn’t attempt to overly embellish or pump the world up. Here is this person who left Collingwood Tech at 14 years and 9 months – they didn’t even know he had gone because he was wagging so much – and he’s speaking alongside the great John Marsden, Raimond Gaita and Hannie Rayson.
My teaching style is quite personal, so I think I must have mentioned the wordlessness of my father, and something must have touched Barry. My father was an Italian peasant, an uneducated man who wasn’t touched by great literature, but he had a tendency to cry. My mother would always go, “oh look at him, pissio occhio – pissing his eyes.”
I didn’t like having to visit Barry in a psychiatric ward. Part of you thinks, I don’t know what to say to someone in the deep abyss, but you soon realise that you are better at it than you think you are. Mind you, if someone just cuts their finger, I go eeegh! I don’t pretend to be terribly brave, but it would be pretty awful to be 59 and say that I’ve shirked others’ stories of deep pain.
Twelve years ago when I invited Barry to speak to another new class, he said to me, “Bruno, I can’t. I’m a bit down at the moment.” But I asked him to come in and tell us what that was like. He wrote a poem called ‘The Ride’ which was about hanging on because you’re about to go into this steep descent. He read it out, and of course Carolyn’s in the class. She was so moved she had to leave the room. I don’t think she’d heard a man speak so sensitively about a condition she also lives with. Like all great attractions, it was something you don’t realise at the time.
I gave Carolyn away at Barry’s wedding a year later. She was about a foot and a half taller than me, looking stunning in her dress. Barry and I aren’t that much different in age, but at times there is a fatherly feeling I have for him. We have lived through each other’s major calamities and joys. I cried on his shoulder when my marriage went belly-up. Barry is instinctively the man I go and sit with when I’m broken hearted. Great friendship is about the shortcuts and the coded language referring to moments that you don’t need to explain.
We are both sooks. We will cry at the same bits of stories. We’ll sing together the same daggy songs. We are proof of an emotional literacy between men. I have all Barry’s letters in black scrapbooks. I’m turning sixty this year and he has already appointed himself as my speechmaker. He might bury me too, if I were to die. You know how we all balk at that kind of thing? I think he would know exactly what to say.
Alice Pung