Finishing the Hat
on losing lucky caps and the one who could.
I lost my lucky cap recently. It was a New York Public Library cap, shoplifted from the Grand Central Library’s gift shop, sometime when I was living in Brooklyn in 2017. It was black, once, but had faded to a rusty grey in recent years, battered by the elements, starched by the ocean, and stained with the sunscreen I have to coat myself in during Perth’s brutal summers. It had the NYPL logo (a lion) in its centre and ‘NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY’, or some such, written above its velcro strap in a font awfully close to comic sans. I think I lost it somewhere in Sydney airport (I must have left it in the tray at security), sleep deprived and exhausted as I was after a financially calamitous three day run of my show BAD BOY BUCKLEY, a show which, ironically (I guess), has made me lose my head.
I don’t take loss well, especially if the thing lost was ‘lucky’ and/or ‘loved’. I spent three days calling JetStar, Sydney domestic terminal 2 lost and found, Uber, our airbnb, and the venue where I’d performed to see if they’d seen any sign of my hat. Holy heck, I want it back!
I am a sentimentalist. I am an only child. I am a bullshitter. I am alone. Lonely, as only an only child can be. Only children know too well the weird import of an object (a toy, a rock, a cap) as it can often be your soul companion and witness through the winding woods of this world. You imbue things with life for company and conversation. If you didn’t, the isolation would drive you mad.
So I want my cap back. It stored the ghosts of so many selves, selves from the past seven years that have been, for the large part, taken out back and done away with. I need these ghosts, I need their chatter, I need their memories. Memories of sitting in Metrograph theatre, alone, watching Alex Cox’s Walker for the first time. Of reading Joy Williams’ Quick and the Dead on the L train. Of sitting on the roof of the factory I used to live above, watching the skaters from across the hall hoon around and throw beer cans down the exhaust chute which ran under my bedroom (turning it into a literal oven that summer). Of sitting on a picnic blanket at South Beach with someone I’d risk severe sunburn for. Of friends, lovers, and true loves. I remember one of the middle group saying it was the only hat I owned (I own a fair few) that fit my notoriously monstrous head. She wasn’t wrong. It fit me perfectly, and few things do.
So, I want it back. But it’s gone. Done. Finished! So it goes.
The concept of a ‘lucky’ hat is one I've carried with me since I was small. Again, see the only child guff above, but it’s more than that. I have always craved a certain level of quickly digestible branding—to be a soundbite, a catchphrase, a slogan. I was raised on cartoons, and value the immediacy of an iconic outfit i.e. Bart Simpson’s orange shirt, blue shorts, and (occasional) red ‘lucky’ cap. A cap gets its message across, quickly. A cap is a fast-talker, like myself. A cap does not shut up until it is taken off.
It is also, to me, a frame for a face that tends to be a little too cartoonish, a tad over animated, a smidgen misdrawn. There are the practical considerations, also. As I said, I burn easy. Slip Slop Slap really resonated with me, a kid a shade paler than Gollum and as averse to direct sunlight. I was/am also cursed with a head of untameable curls that have only grown wilder, springier, and more defiant as I’ve grown older. As a little kid, they were golden ringlets, and I so hated the adoration they attracted from any woman over the age of sixty that I made sure I had a hat on me at all times to stuff them away and save myself from the inevitable “I wish I had your curls!” as well as the proceeding cheek pinches (I looked like a child from a Victorian soap ad, if that helps).
I understood then, as I do now, that a cap is an announcement. A quick little statement that gets your schtick across. This is important to someone like me, who has to rush to get their schtick out as quickly as possible to avoid any confusion as to why I am like this. The cap eases folks into it. The cap is a business card. The cap kicks down doors.
And my NYPL cap kicked like Sammo Hung.
My other go to lucky cap, shoplifted from the Guggenheim gift shop in January 2019 (my friend Laura said the shop would be too difficult to steal from [it’s a nook], not realising I’d been wearing the stolen cap the entire time we were looking at the art, anyway). It is a nice shade of grey, with the words ‘non-objective’ stitched on its front in bright orange lettering (the Guggenheim was first known as ‘The Museum of Non-Objective Painting’). This hat, perhaps my luckiest (easily the one that pairs best with most outfits), with its neatly pretentious little catchphrase, elegantly conveys what a li’l wanker I am to whoever I’m talking to with an ease I could only otherwise dream of. It is a very useful tool (if slightly tight on my massive noggin) that I love dearly. An ex once left it under a seat at the wrestling at the Perth Royal Show and I almost collapsed in grief and worry until it was back in my hands. It holds too many memories, too many ‘non-objective’ stories, images, and art, all of which flood over me and out of me, bouncing around in a frenetic little collage whenever I pop it on or merely see it there, hanging on the rack.
A cap is a wearable madeleine. Not just for memories, but for fictions—for play! Invention! When I was very little, my cousins and I would pretend we were characters from Madeline (we loved our bred, we loved out butter, etc), and I, the only boy of our trio, and the only one with a ‘scary’ Jurassic Park cap, and the only one you could consider ‘naughty,’ would be Pepito aka ‘The Bad Hat.’ I have identified strongly with Pepito ever since (bad, horny, rude, narcissistic, hopelessly in love).
Back in New York, in 2018, I saw an exhibition of Ludwig Bemelmans’ original Madeline art and was struck by an illustration of Pepito titled “he built himself a guillotine”, where Pepito appears to have done just that. I was wearing my ‘non-objective’ hat at that exhibition. I came to see it as my Pepito hat, my ‘Bad Hat,’ that would help me build my guillotines and run away with the Madelines of the world, the Miss Clavel of the world’s willing.
Now, I associate it with a picture of someone I love, a Madeline, wearing it at a gig at the Fremantle Buffalo Club, smiling at me between puffs on their vape. The cap speaks back to me in the picture: ‘non-objective.’
Magic words. A command. I must obey.
I have built my life around this ‘non-objective’ magic, for better or for worse (it’s worse). When working, I am constantly navigating a labyrinth of recall, remembrances, re-emergences, reinventions and realities—a great vast skeleton-infested, booby-trapped image pit, held together by an interconnected network of spiderweb, from which dangle the skeletons of the gonners, the gone, and the going. My hats are both pick-axe and compass. They are akin to the special items you have to equip in Ocarina of Time to explore each dungeon. Without them, there is no way in, nevermind out.
Like Link and his green tunic (anyone play Minish Cap? Great game!) I feel like I only gain control of these stories and sidequests when I’m properly decked out in my mascot fit: PATRICK as seen on the box! etc. Lucky cap, thinking cap, work hat—it’s moronic, maybe, but I feel the little lantern flicker on when I don one, and I’m then ready to start in on the only thing I am capable of doing (bullshitting, making stuff up, j/o etc).
The NYPL cap contained a lot of magic that I’m sad to lose. Without it, my mana bar has shrunk, woefully. It was a relic I’d brought back with me from the promised land. The Grand Central branch of the New York Public Library was a holy place in my journey as a writer. It was a temple I returned to often while in New York, be it to work, stroll, or dick about in. It was there, on my first visit in 2007, aged 17, that I saw the original scroll to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road laid out in a long glass cabinet (also the manuscript of Howl, amongst others). Say what you want about Kerouac and The Beats and co. (too many striped shirts!) but seeing that scroll (120 ft long) firsthand clarified something that I had suspected but put off accepting for a while, despite wanting to be a writer since I was six: writing is work. Hard work. A trade. Labour. Better get to it or bow out now while you’re still young—quick smart!
My NYPL cap was a busted-up reminder of this humbling awakening. So, I need it back.
I am a rather lazy person by inclination. A born slacker. My work is the one exception. I will drive myself like a beaten mule when it comes to writing and performing. I will gladly flay my mind and body by sitting at my desk for twelve hours or more a day for weeks on end spewing guff at the cost of my health, relationships, and happiness, until a thing feels ‘finished’.
Which it never does, of course. Here, again, a cap is a nifty reminder. It’s called a ‘baseball cap’ for a reason, afterall (please see lucky cap 13 in the list below). And whether your team is the Cubs, The Freo Dockers, or the Guggenheims (‘CARN THE GOOGS!) your cap is there to say “hey, there’s always next season.” This game may end, but the game itself does not. It is always being played, somewhere. Don’t get too comfortable on the off-season. There is no off-season for the pros. Keep fit. Hone your skills. Slip, slop, slap. Kick on.*
*(I have owned one lucky cap that was for a sports team. It was a Wallabies cap that I wore from ages 9-12ish despite being incredibly indifferent towards all sports, particularly rugby, which continues to make no sense to me).
Last Christmas the same person who wore my ‘non-objective’ cap at The Buffalo Club gifted me perhaps the most beautiful cap I’ll ever own. It is a vintage Sydney Olympics cap embroidered with the mascots Millie (an echidna), Olly (a kookaburra), and Syd (a platypus). Sadly, it did not fit on my Elephant Man-esque boofhead (I’ve alluded to this a few times now but my family on my mother’s side, the Sheas, are infamous for their ginormous ‘Shea heads’, hence me being a C-section). But I could instantly feel the aura of a new lucky cap, even if I couldn’t quite wear it. The magic was there. I was zapped back to those Olympics, which I attended with my dad. We stayed with his “friend,” a recently divorced sad-sack he hadn’t really spoken to in over 20 years whose proto-emo fourteen year old son (I was 9) sat with me one night and made me watch an incredibly violent OVA that I’ve never been able to identify, despite it having some pretty memorable eviscerations and cyborg rape scenes.
Syd (the platypus) in particular conjures up a memory of my mother and I waiting in line at the merch truck at the Olympics event that was held at the Esplanade oval in Fremantle. I wanted a stuffed Syd toy. We lined up for what felt like hours. In front of us was a posh woman with a huge husky (in my mind’s eye she looked and talked like Margaret Dumont, though this is probably untrue). She bought the final Syd toy. As soon as it was handed to her, without breaking a beat, she turned to her dog and said “here you go, Chauncey” (probably not his name) and Chauncey snatched it from her and proceeded to tear it to shreds in front of me.
This is the magic of the ‘lucky’ hat in full swing! This person, who loved me very much, knew by then the sort of artefact I was always chasing in my doomed quest to unlock all the things and unturn all the stones and bullshit through all the stories so as to make more of them. They found this hat brimming with that magic. They then filled it with a fair chunk of their own, and gifted it to me. And then, comically, they/we failed to squeeze it on the prize-winning pumpkin I’m sorry to call a head.
Still, the will of the thing remains. That particular lucky cap bottles that relationship, as does the ‘non-objective’ one. They spark a kaleidoscope like slideshow of this person in me, even when I wish they wouldn’t. It is always odd to carry about totems of lost love, but I find I must. These are the most potent reminders of how and why we got where we are, what it is we are doing, what it is we need to begin, and what it is that needs finishing.
I met that person in Spring 2022. I was lost rewriting one novel, editing a second, and starting up another, toiling away in a little studio I’d rented for that purpose on Pakenham street. I had just got back from Sydney, where I’d toured my show Killing Rove. I was recently heartbroken, and playing Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind perhaps too much (I was in the .5% of his top listeners that year, yeesh!). I had my NYPL and/or non-objective hats hanging from hooks behind my monitor screen. I sometimes wore them as I typed at my admittedly ridiculous standing desk, the glare of the afternoon sun blaring through my studio’s window, often leaving me a nice shade of pink.
I was also listening to Finishing the Hat, as sung by Mandy Patinkin (as painter George Seurat) in Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, over and over and over again on a near constant loop.
Sondheim died in 2021, and his death had sent me back into his work. I remembered talking to my friend Chris about Sondheim that day we visited the Guggenheim. I loved Sondheim, loved musicals, always had. It was the natural result of being raised by old ladies and being my grandma having Singin’ in the Rain on VHS. I would write my own musicals compulsively. I wrote a Chairman Mao musical (my Maosical) in high-school, which I’ve only performed for a handful of unfortunate souls. Once, while manic, I wrote two-thirds of a There Will be Blood musical that will one day make me rich or get me committed for life (fine with both). It was stories, it was music, it was jokes—what else did I need?
But that Spring, in that studio, it was just me and Finishing the Hat. I was listening to it moments before I first met the person who bought me the Olympics cap, removing my airpods moments right as I walked up to Ezra Pound, where we drank a vodka tonic each before going to see George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing, which neither of us particularly liked. I was wearing my ‘non-objective’ hat that night also, the same one they’d wear at that gig at The Buffalo Club a year or so later.
At some point, around the time I realised this person might love me for my goofiness, and after discussing our mutual love for Sondheim, I sent them a recording of me singing Finishing the Hat as Donald Trump (look, my Trump is very very good, but I can see how this can appear more cringe than a million unsolicited dick pics). I had to get it just right. I think I did roughly 23 takes before sending one I felt to be perfect. It had to be perfect for them, so that—?
Sondheim had—has—me thinking about my priorities.
Not long after this, circumstance had me rewatching Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. In it, there’s a scene where Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) come across a poster for a Seurat exhibition which begins in a week’s time—after they will have returned to their respective homes, countries, and lives. “I love the way the people seem to be dissolving into the background,” Celine says, looking at the works on the poster. “His human figures are always so transitory.”
I fear I am becoming transitory. So I hold onto my hats.They are the totems I cling to to stop myself dissolving into the background of people’s lives, or worse, the background of my work—of myself.
I was built lonely. I am lonesome. I detest loneliness. I am in constant psychic and physical pain day in and day out. I am overwhelmed by life, by, to quote Christoper Moltisanti, “the regularness” of it. Not in some disaffected snobbish way, but in a very literal sensory one: sounds and textures and light are steadily becoming “too much” for me, everywhere. I am, undeniably, becoming an old fashioned lunatic. But I love to love and be loved and love loving someone. The only thing that excites me half as much is the work.
When I’m writing—writing the absolute dumbest dreck thought up by anyone—I am a hyper-focussed laser. The pain is gone. The racket quiets. The light no longer stings. It’s just me and my work, my moronic characters, their incessant chatter, the screwball action, and my obsessively munted ways of formatting dialogue (I have made hells for myself that would drive your average copy editor to suicide). I am up until 3am, animating a deepfaked naked Paul Keating so that I can hold court with it on stage. I am rewriting Dante’s Inferno so that it’s about two FIFOs out for a night on the town in Perth. I am coming up with jokes about Modi that should—in all fairness—have me shot. I am in the foreground.
One of the novels I wrote in that little studio, Nock Loose, goes to print in a month. I began writing it around the time of that gig at The Buffalo Club, fuelled by new love and Vyvanse in equal measure. It has swallowed up the past eighteen moths of my life. It is due, it is overdue, it should be done. But I am still fiddling with it, tinkering away at things like the history of the fictional energy drink that cameos in all my books. Dumb stuff! And there is a fear, a genuine and abiding fear, that once it is out there, no longer mine, the time in my life that made the thing will also be out there and no longer mine, along with the people that filled that time, made transitory, let, for want of a better word, loose. So—
I am finishing the hat.
And you become stuck finishing it because it is never finished. And then there’s always the next one. So you think—you trick yourself into believing—you’ll finish that one, and then, finally, you’ll be whole, you’ll be loved, you’ll be understood. Maybe not by everyone, but by that one person that slipped away while you went mad finishing the hat. They’ll get it. Because if anybody could, etc.
It takes a lot of loss and longing to realise the hat is not the be all and end all, that the work in and of itself is not enough to fill your life with, that it will often drive your life out, derail it, and even attempt to extinguish it, be it by madness, poverty, or both. You get dizzy from the height of making the thing, then, if you’re me at least, you trip over yourself and take a bad fall. Dizzy, dizzy, oh so dizzy from the heights of ‘look, I made a hat!’ where there never was a hat.
Not there, anyway. Where there was—the New York Public Library, The Buffalo Club, their bedroom on Christmas morning, the security tray at Sydney airport—is where you were, who you were with, how you loved them, what movie you were watching, your thoughts on it on the walk home together on a summer’s night where there’s nothing but sky and each other. That is the real work. That is where the hat is. That is where lost hats go. That’s it.
It may distance, it may die, but it never finishes.
A ROUGH LIST OF LUCKY CAPS THROUGHOUT MY LIFE, IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE
Dorothy the Dinosaur cap with teeth around rim + neck flap, dark green w polka-dots. Sun smart and snappy.
Jurassic Park cap with attacking T-rex illustration, red. Closer than it appears.
Godzilla (1997) cap with ‘3D’ plastic claws tearing through it, black. ‘That’s a lot of fish’
Dragon Ball Z beanie, black. Beanies are also important, especially if they let people know you love and appreciate Vegeta.
Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo cap, dark green w. black brim. I can still sing all the original songs from ‘Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics.’
Wallabies cap, yellow and green. Was signed by Jeff Fenech at the 2000 Olympic Games, despite me telling my dad I did not want Jeff Fenech, whoever that is, to ruin my hat.
World Industries cap, red. Flame Boy, of course.
Independent cap, silver. Their logo looks too much like the iron cross. I couldn’t skate for shit btw, what a poser!
Element trucker cap, dark green and beige. Distinctly remember wearing this on my first day of highschool and an older boy calling me the f-slur because I had not bent the brim.
Rolling Stones cap, black. Around the age of 15 I suddenly acquired an afro (don’t ask), and it became even more difficult to fit hats on my head. Disgusting.
Train driver cap, black. Look, I wanted to be Bob Dylan/Woody Guthrie from the ages 16 to about 23. I have the exact same hair as Woody.
Grimace cap, grey. What I loved about this goofy skate cap was that people would lock eyes with the Grimace’s when talking to me, saving me from the agony of eye contact.
Chicago Cubs (maybe) cap, blue. This hat was a beautiful shade of blue. It had a v minimal design, and didn’t look, to me (an idiot), like it belonged to a sports team. But one July 4th (2018) I wore it to Coney Island, and some guy lost it at me and threatened to tear my head off for wearing it out and about in NOO YAWK.
PlayStation cap, pink. I wore this cap a lot in 2017. It was the playstation logo with some kinda pun, but for the life of me I can’t remember what the pun was, which is making me feel…insane?
Japan Rail cap, blue. A friend/lover gave this to me around the time we TRAINsitioned into just friends. I treasure it but I fear it screams ‘HELLO, I AM AUTISTIC!’
Nope cap, denim. Love this guy. Matches my beautiful blue eyes. Got it from a shop around the corner from me in Bushwick. It simply reads ‘nope’ with a little thumbs up. Straight to the point.
NYPL cap, black. Baby, come home!
Gengar cap, black. Talking about screaming ‘HELLO, I AM AUTISTIC!’. Gengar is my second favourite Pokemon, but looks better on a hat than Cubone.
Capsule Corp cap, white. Damn, I am autistic hey. Another lost soul, sadly. I left it in the food court at Penn Station before some friends and I caught the train to Art Omi. Yes, I contacted lost property, but no dice.
Guggenheim ‘non-objective’ cap, grey w. orange lettering. See above.
Mew cap, black w. blue embroidered Mew. Found underneath a truck.
Sonic cap, grey. Gotta go fast (I have always kinda loathed Sonic, sorry pervs).
Bart Simpson ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’ cap, yellow. Says it all!
Vintage Universal Studios Looney Tunes cap, lotsa colours. All ya favs are on this bad boy. Bugs Bunny is the greatest American to ever live.
Olympics cap, black w. embroidered Olympic mascots. To me, it fits.