Marco is about to turn 50, he works part time in a bar kitchen, has three boys and went to Otago Boys’ High School.
That is where the similarities end with his creator, Dunedin author Breton Dukes, and Dukes is quick to point that out.
"Marco doesn’t have writing. He doesn’t know who he is. And he’s had way more trauma and harder experiences than I ever have. So he’s more damaged. When I write, I’m looking to exaggerate. And in exaggerating, I’m trying to create heaps of drama."
And he succeeded; his first novel, Party Boy, has its main character Marco on a fast track to disaster in the first few pages as he slowly loses control on a shift in the kitchen at the bar he works in.
"I was thinking how can I put him under as much pressure as possible at the very start of the book to bring up all these issues, family stuff, stuff from when he was a kid. And then bringing in the boys from his school to be there lurking in the background.
"I’m just trying to add drama, to put him under immense pressure to see whether he’ll crack. Everyone loves watching someone crack in fiction. I find that it’s entertaining."
But it is not something he has experienced personally.
"I never had any trouble in the kitchen. I just did my job, mostly. It was quiet. I worked on Thursdays. I got all the food organised. I’m sort of a bit anxious, so I have to be organised in my life or it falls apart."
The work was the result of reading in the news media about David Bond being convicted of sex crimes against boys while a teacher at the school including when Dukes was a student.
"I thought he was pretty dodgy and creepy, but I didn’t realise he was actually abusing kids. I had this immediate reaction of rage towards the school for letting this man operate unchecked in the school for about 35 years."
So he decided to write a book about it. Dukes started off with an essay talking about issues such as conformity and homophobia at that time.
The response to the essay saw him arrange interviews with about 30 old boys where he talked to them about their experiences at the school. He also read every Otago Boys’ magazine going back to the 1960s when Bond was a pupil.
"I was beginning to build up a picture of his time there, all the trips he took, at the same time as interviewing these men."
The further through the interviews he got the more harrowing it became.
"It started to wear me down. Some of them had very seriously bad times at the hostel, where they’d been bullied. Some of them had been abused by Bond. Some of them had been bullied. Some of them had just been at school and seen terrible things happening and were just recounting their memories."
By the time he got down to the last few interviews he was getting off the phone crying. He found it too upsetting and pulled the plug on taking the non-fiction project any further.
Although he admits it took a long time to find that freedom and joy and even longer to admit to it. Having grown up reading and liking stories, he was in his 20s when he realised he had a creative urge but it was not until his 30s that he began writing and realised that was where his creativity was best directed.
"I went to Otago Boys’ and I went to Otago University. I did physical education there. I wasn’t in a world where storytelling or creativity were something that people did.
"Rugby was what you did and you drank beer and you vomited in the Octagon. You know? And you tried to pick up women. It was blokey."
So admitting to wanting to write was hard. If he did, people would look sideways at him. An old employer once said to him"oh you’re still doing that art-farty writing stuff".
The feelings are a hangover from the time he grew up in, he says. He still feels he should get a "proper job".
"So I almost had a sort of shame about wanting to do it. I felt sort of shy about it. For a long, long time. And I still have that, I’m finding this publicity hard because there’s still some of that in me."
But he persisted, taking a course with Dunedin writer Diane Brown as he started to learn more about the craft, then did his masters in Wellington around 2008.
"I began to understand a bit more about the craft and really how to finish a story and work on it and get feedback from other people, on how to kind of handle that. And also started reading with sort of more intensity, like trying to understand what writers were doing.
He went on to write a series of short stories, releasing collections What Sort of Man (2020), Empty Bones (2014) and Bird North (2011).
Party Boy came about as a reaction to the intensity of the Bond research. He decided to write fiction again and taking inspiration from real life decided to write about an "old guy like me in the kitchen" and see where it went.
"Because I’d been thinking so much about Otago Boys’ and talking to these guys, just naturally it was in my conscious and subconscious."
Dukes realised in writing about it and including a couple of the incidents from his own experiences and that of the men he interviewed, there would be increased interest, but he hoped people would not get "hung up on the Otago Boys’ stuff".
"I don’t think all-boys schools are a very good idea. But there’s also stuff about his relationships, stuff about his kids, stuff about his childhood. I’m trying to capture his life up until that moment.
"What I would most like is for people to engage with the story, see the humour in it, see the drama in it, and take some other things away from it, not just the Otago Boys’ stuff. I want people to have an emotional connection with the story."
One of those other aspects is what it is like to be a stay-at-home parent — something Dukes identifies with and believes many parents will too — but again Marco’s story is an exaggerated example. In the three-week period of the novel, Marco faces up to a lot.
"I mean, it’s insanely packed. You can’t read that as realism. It’s too exaggerated. No-one’s life is that insane."
"I think being a stay-at-home parent is hard, and boring. Mostly it’s just boring drudgery, where you’re picking your kid up from daycare, making their lunch in the morning, you’re trying to get the Weet-Bix out of the carpet, you’re doing another pile of washing. I’m like the ’50s housewife. There’s that trapped feeling."
His writing is an escape from that drudgery and now his children are older he can spend more hours writing, in between the washing and cooking.
"If I didn’t have that, and Marco doesn’t have the writing, I would find that very hard on my mental health. There’s no paycheck. So there’s not really any extrinsic reward. You’ve just got to do it."
That work and his part-time job are some of the reasons it took nearly four years to finish the novel. He wrote it in mostly one or two-hour sessions with longer sessions when he got further along due to family support giving him more quiet time to write.
Maintaining motivation throughout that time was not easy. He credits regular Zoom sessions with fellow writers and having friends to bounce ideas and chunks of work off as helping him through.
"You’ve got to have a belief that it’s something worth doing and worth plugging away at."
And it was. Seeing the book published made him very proud — but he will not be writing or talking about men, damaged men or Otago Boys’ again.
"I don’t really know anything about toxic masculinity. I know it’s all in the book, that’s all. That was what I saw when I grew up. I’m not an expert on that.
"I just set my book in that space and time with that guy as a really exaggerated version of Dunedin males that I saw or grew up around."
