Dylan Cleaver is doing a special ghostwriting job.
So there we were, two sons of Naki – one inside and one outside – on the journey from Ōpunake back to New Plymouth. I was driving, getting used to the lonely road that runs through a dairy farm, with the best of the country’s surf on the left and the proud maunga on the right. Carl was in the passenger seat. We were talking about two subjects firmly in the hearts and minds of local people: rugby and agriculture.
Only one of us knew how to play the game with any skill and only one of us had reason to pull a calf born to a bull, so only one of us, the rider, was really talking.
The driver listened intently, making mental notes that, later that night, would be turned into old paper records.
The conversation must have been one-sided but it flowed easily until somewhere near Ōkato, when it began to spin around, swaying in blind alleys and sometimes wandering around.
This is not the first time I have encountered this phenomenon, but I was still struggling with the right answer.
Do I tell him to stop talking and breathe? How do you do this in an understated way?
We often conducted our interviews in places where there was an easy answer. We just stopped. Sometimes we would hang out at a cafe in Warkworth, near my house and Mangawhai, where he would spend time with his three children and his ex-wife Natalie.
He jumped into the car with his friend Kiko, their daughter Genevieve and Finchley the dog, and headed back to Mangawhai. Kiko had a better time relating to power than Carl and I, and he gives signs – sometimes subtle, sometimes not – that this episode is about to come to an end.
Carl tells me that a way to think about brain power is that we all started the day with a bucket of water. Most people, despite losing a little bit of steam and more when we got to the amazing trail, had plenty left to get us through the 16 or so hours that make up a waking day.
He started the day with a bucket of water, too, but his had holes in it.
When it’s over, Carl crawls into bed, collapses on the bed or just sits and stares blankly. I never saw him like that, but instead I found him in a moment like the one in the car, when his water, his energy, was running out fast – when a part of him knew that he had tried so hard not to work but his brain just couldn’t. t go ahead and start putting his mind in the wrong place.
“Where were we,” he asked apologetically. We were, at this point in his story, at Toulon, the place where Carl was, according to his skill as an agent, at the height of his greatest powers. It was also, as I learned in detail, where his life began to change.
It was a long day, as we headed south to see where Carl grew up in Ōpunake and the family farm at Oaonui, before returning to the Surf Highway to his home above his tourism business, Chaddy’s Charters, near the harbor in New. Plymouth.
It was a great day for me as I understood the nature that helped create the modern image, and although Carl enjoyed being a tour guide – “that condemned house is where Dame Malvina Major lived, but it fell. hands of meth cooks” – it was a tiring day for him.
So on his way back, as he talks about the injuries he’s played through for pride at one of the biggest rugby clubs in the world, he oscillates between moments of clarity and moments of impossible fog.
I felt guilty, not so much for helping Carl get into this situation, although I think I would have felt sorry for him, but for taking so long to understand that this was “real”. This was his life now: an outlet. On good days the water drains more slowly than others, but there was no equipment to repair the boreholes to fix it.
This is why there was an urgency to his stories that I didn’t appreciate until now. What he can remember today he may not be able to do tomorrow. He was in a one-man race to create meaning in his life.
So I let him keep talking, wandering around trying to string his thoughts together. Yeah, I felt a lot of pain, knowing that we will pass through the same place when we meet again.
Here we were in Taranaki, my home state, but we got lost in Toulon.
Carl and anxiety. They worry about big and small things. All kinds of things. He is worried about the wrong events, although his memory, especially finding memories of his childhood, is very good. He laments that his flawed and sometimes contradictory views would appear in a flawed and sometimes contradictory story, even though it is the contradictions that make people so interesting.
He also hates that people think he is dumb. He knows the clichéIt is sos should be as low as the front row. Although she has played her career largely in accordance with male stereotypes, she wants people to realize that there is more to her than that.
Worried about what her loved ones think of her, she has now revealed the extent of her nervous and psychological problems.
Carl is worried about the breakup. Not just about the book.
I complained again. Sometimes my worries were personal, like when I heard that Carl, an alcoholic, was drinking.
I was worried that the cost of driving would send him into an environment that he would find difficult to get out of.
Sometimes, selfishly, my concerns were technical. I had a manuscript deadline looming and there was a lot to do.
Carl had a powerful and inspiring story to tell. I knew this from the moment he said that no part of his life was over, especially the parts he wanted to erase. His whole story was there, almost frozen, exploding to come out.
I was worried that the only person who could swallow it was that “dumb magic writer”.
That’s why I’ve been hesitant to write this piece. What I initially thought would be an evening’s work has turned into a hectic few days of writing, erasing and rewriting.
To some extent, this organization made me very happy. In my heart I believe that Head On is an important project and I want it to get the attention it needs.
But it’s not my book.
And ghosts don’t talk.
Or to quote the words of JR Moehringer, who has written words on the pages of Andre Agassi, Phil ‘Shoe Dog’ Knight and Henry Windsor: “With and without words, nobody wants to hear from a dumb ghostwriter.”
So I called Carl and let him know what The Spinoff had requested. How would he feel if I wrote about some of the unique challenges we faced while writing his story?
Unsurprisingly, he agreed immediately. Not surprising because Carl says “yes” to most things.
He has been doing a lot of promoting his stories. He appeared on Sunday. He did radio interviews with Mike Hosking, and Jason Pine, and Kathryn Ryan. He was contacted by the Otago Daily Times and Woman’s Day. He took pictures with Stuff.
It has taken its toll. Sunday was very taxing. You can see it in the app, which was hard for me to see. The painting took him out for three whole days, he tells me.
With that in mind, this feels like the least I can do.
They and the least I can do.
Yesterday, Carl passed through on his way back to Taranaki after riding the day before for the Matariki breakfast. One had written him a letter asking him to come. How can you deny that?
He looks good, he sounds good, he signed some books. We went for coffee and Carl shared his thoughts on connecting New Zealanders with similar issues. A number of former players, some of them teammates, have contacted him since he appeared in the game and his book hit the shelves, recognizing in themselves the problems he is facing.
It has given him strength. The holes in his bucket remain, but he doesn’t sit around waiting for them to run out.
It was a timely trip because I didn’t know how to finish the story.
The ending worried me… not anymore.
Title: The All Black’s memoir of rugby, dementia, and the hidden cost of success (HarperCollins, $39.99) is out now.
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