A CHANGE IS AS GOOD AS A HOLIDAY 10 page

My mouth dropped open and I stared at him. His mouth was clenched and he stared back.

I was about to say, “What about the fucking money? What about the dope?” when I realized that, cop or no cop, he was a little bit disturbed. It definitely looked like too much methamphetamine to me: tight jaws, paranoia. He was not in a good mood and he was pressing a gun into my thigh. Sometimes you have to readjust.

So I said, “Right. Okay. Right.”

I unclasped my seat belt and got out of the car, uncomfortable with adrenaline, almost in pain.

He left at the same mad speed. I stood there bewildered. Was he still going to the Shangri La Club, to get the hammer or the cash? Maybe he just had something against me. But something wasn’t right. I thought about Candy. I had to stop her. I turned around just as she came hurtling along at the best speed the Holden could muster, following the route to the Shangri La.

I lurched out onto the side of the road, waving to get her attention. It was too late. She was hunched forward and worried and didn’t notice me through the rain-drenched windshield.

Now it struck me that he could kill her.

I ran through the rain. The Shangri La was about a kilometer away, down along the Lower Esplanade. I had four dollars in my pocket. A cab came past and I hailed it. He dropped me off thirty seconds later at the Upper Esplanade, from where I could look down into the Shangri La parking lot.

As I reached the railing I saw Candy pull in and park. The place was full of cars.

She got out, looking around her for the BMW, uncertain as to where I might be or what to do.

I cupped my hands over my mouth. “Candy! Candy!”

It must have reached her faintly through the rain. She turned and scanned the horizon. I waved my arms in the air.

“Get the fuck out of there! He’s got a gun!”

I don’t know exactly what words she heard. But she knew. She got out of there.

Twenty minutes later we sat in the car in the parking lot of the Port Melbourne 7-Eleven. The rain had stopped. Now you couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead of you in the swirling mist that had replaced it. It was four A.M. There were no more jobs tonight. No more money. No more dope.

We had enough money for cigarettes. We knew that if we even attempted to shoplift on a night like this, we would be caught. Sometimes you just had to accept the limitations of your bad luck runs.

We were shaken up. Candy was crying and my eyes weren’t real dry either. I tell you what else, I hated that guy.

“This is bullshit,” Candy sputtered between sobs. “Our lives are bullshit. Do you understand that? We have to stop. Do you see what’s happening to me?”

She said a lot of stuff like this, and I said I know I know. We will we will.

It was a highly charged scene, with dawn coming on and all those tears and mist and the cold car and no dope. It was never nice to have bad feelings leak. That’s why heroin had to be a full-time career. Anyway, we drove home and went to bed feeling fucked. We took some Rohypnol, but it was hard to sleep more than a restless hour or so.

For a while afterward I found it satisfying to try and imagine what ended up happening to the guy in the BMW. I used to imagine he died in a high-speed crash, but that he didn’t die right away. It was a country road, maybe, in the middle of the night, and he was all mangled up around a tree. He was upside down and covered in blood and bent out of shape in all the twisted metal. He knew he was dying. It was getting harder to breathe. He screamed for a good long time.

But no one was around, of course. And I wasn’t about to help him.

Grey Street was when things were getting real fucking ugly. So it was like a blessing when Casper, an old friend of Candy’s, came back from the States. I saw a chance to redeem myself. To pull my weight and supply the dope for a change. If I could only make heroin—and Casper was the key to this—then Candy and I could live like landed gentry, and all the bullshit would disappear from our lives.

COOKING

When we finally convinced Casper to sell us the recipe, I figured we could begin to live in a kind of self-constructed heaven. A heaven on earth forever and ever, for as long as we both should live.

It wasn’t easy to get Casper to yield his secrets. I hounded him relentlessly.

“But, Casper, we don’t really know the same people. It’s not like I’m going to be taking any business away from you.”

“You and Candy every day is not business?”

“Come on, man, be a friend. There’s plenty more where we came from. Sell us the recipe. I want to be self-sufficient.”

Finally he agreed. Casper was a brilliant chemist gone, you might say, slightly awry. He was tall and handsome, urbane, polite, considerate. He had a massive habit and he manufactured his own hammer, extracting the codeine from Panadeine capsules, converting it to morphine and then heroin. He’d just returned from a Fulbright scholarship in the United States, where he completed his doctorate on a new synthesis of tetracycline and related antibiotics. He was back in Melbourne doing some part-time lecturing and tutoring at Melbourne University.

As an undergraduate, he’d fucked around a little making speed and ecstasy, and once he even cooked up synthetic mescaline for everyone. Now, with a more sophisticated problem that he’d fine-tuned in New York, he wasn’t about to mess around with kids’ stuff. He’d gone back through the journals and sourced some of the original papers on the synthesis of codeine and morphine, particularly Gates’s 1954 morphine paper.

He was a bona fide fucking genius. Casper read this shit and he worked it out in his head in ten minutes. He was pretty private, of course, so it was lucky that Candy knew him from the old days. He wouldn’t see many people. Didn’t need to.

Casper had the best smack in Melbourne, no doubt about that. This was not a backyard home bake with bad equipment and inadequate chemicals. Casper became number one on our list. But as a heroin dealer, he was awful, because he was so comfortable, and therefore unreliable.

I knew the story, the terrible vicious circle. When you’ve got dope, why worry about someone else’s pain? But when you’re in pain, you wonder how a dealer could not understand. Of course, we got used to taking the shit with the sugar, but it was frustrating sometimes, knowing that Casper was probably on the nod at his place three suburbs away, with all that Yellow Jesus in a jar. The midday movie meandering through his brain and his mum cooking him lunch.

After I’d begged and groveled every day for about three months, he relented and sold me the recipe. Five hundred bucks, which included three lessons and the contents of those three cooks. I had to get the lab equipment and the chemicals myself, from supply companies in the outer suburbs. I got a basic starter’s kit together for less than seven hundred bucks, money I begged and borrowed from friends keen to taste the fruits of my industry. I paid Casper the five hundred in installments, after I sold some of the batch from each lesson.

At first it was shaky. I knew nothing about chemistry, and could only follow Casper’s written recipe to the letter. I didn’t know how to adapt to unusual situations, to changes in color that Casper hadn’t predicted. Gradually, though, through trial and error, I began to get a clearer idea of what I was doing. Within a few months I was doing all right. I was getting better all the time. I even began to enjoy the process.

I thought of myself as the scientist in the cartoon Milton the Monster, which I’d watched as a kid. I still had the theme song in my head, and sometimes, laughing, I’d sing it to Candy as I cooked:

“Six drops of Essence of Terror,
Five drops of Sinister Sauce.”
“When the stirring’s done
May I lick the spoon?”
“Of course! A-ha! Of course!” What was best about the whole situation was that finally, after all the trials and tribulations, I was supplying the dope, controlling the means of production, as I’d always hoped I one day would. Candy didn’t need to work anymore, except in emergencies. Things felt smooth, and why wouldn’t they when you always had dope? The occasional desperate need to try and dry out seemed to have faded into the distant but harrowing past. I felt we’d begun a new chapter in our lives.

Suddenly everyone wanted to see us, but we didn’t need to see many people to keep the show running. Just enough cash to keep things turning over. It may not exactly have been a perpetual-motion machine, and we may well still have been mice running in a wheel, but suddenly, for a while, the wheel seemed a whole lot bigger. Breathing space—as well as pure heroin—was what it was about.

It was nice to have a bit of cash. It was nice to have food in the fridge. It was really nice to go to bed and know that you had a blast to wake up to in the morning. It was good not to have to hustle so much every day, though buying such large quantities of Panadeine wasn’t easy and involved some real logistics; most pharmacies wouldn’t let you buy more than one or two packets, though of course we got to know, love, and frequent the ones whose concepts of professional ethics were conveniently loose. But everything was better than before. These were calmer routines than the routines of the street.

There is certainly a kind of beauty to chemistry.

On an average day, O’Brien might call and say, “What’s the story?” Candy would say, “We’ve already got five packets, you bring three.” The three grams of codeine in eight large packets of Panadeine would eventually become one gram of heroin. Down at the lower end of the junkie food chain, the place where we were used to doing business, a gram of pure heroin could be like four or five of street heroin. So we were doing all right. Every day now was like the old, rare, thousand-dollar day.

The cooking became a meticulous routine: breaking open the capsules (“shelling the peas”), mixing the powder with water, extracting the codeine with a vacuum aspirator and throwing out the paracetamol, separating the codeine from the water with dichloromethane, then evaporating the dichloromethane and dissolving the pure codeine in a reagent, the heating of which resulted in a morphine freebase. From the shelling of the peas to morphine was a detailed and complicated process, which took the better part of two hours.

At this stage I would have a thick liquid—“Tending toward a viscous state,” as Casper had described it, in his strangely formal junkie-scientist drawl—in the bottom of the flask. It was a deep orange-brown, and if it wasn’t, I was in deep shit. I had no contingency plans, like Casper did, with his vast brain full of the poetry of molecules.

The feeling now was always that we were on our fucking way to glory. A couple more extractions in the separating funnel with dichloromethane, a little vacuum aspiration with the flask lowered into boiling water—dichloromethane evaporates at 40 degrees Celsius, a long time before morphine—and a light brown foam of pure morphine would begin to form inside the flask, as if from nowhere.

In all those years at school, I’d never realized that chemistry could be so exciting.

I added enough acetic anhydride to dissolve the morphine, then heated the solution over a naked flame until it began to boil. Right now a beautiful thing was happening. The morphine, bonding with the acetic anhydride, was becoming diacetylmorphine, commonly known as heroin. The by-products were being evaporated away by the action of the vacuum aspirator. I disconnected the aspirator, added a couple of pipettes of water, and swirled. Most of the oil dissolved. I could get the rest later with a quick reheat. Finally, since it was alkaline dope, I added a single drop of glacial acetic acid.

It was the Holy Grail. In my tiny 50 mil measuring beaker there was enough liquid heroin—sometimes rich gold, sometimes dark orange, sometimes pale yellow—to make a few friends happy, to make a little money, and to get Candy and me comfortably through the next twenty-four hours.

“Okay, O’Brien,” I’d say. “Let’s say twenty-five bucks for the three packets. Give us twenty bucks more and I’ll do you a nice shot.”

He’d give me twenty dollars and his pick. I’d dip the pick in my jar and pull back to .3. On a good cook, .3 would generally do someone more than adequately. Candy and I had heaps more, of course, but that’s both the privilege of free enterprise and the necessity of a big habit.

O’Brien had veins you could drive a truck through and was always stoned in about six seconds. He never even used a tourniquet. I’d open new syringes and fill them for me and Candy to .8 or .9. Just enough room to jack back.

O’Brien was one of those people who seemed to be affected by heroin as if it were speed. He became a Mexican fucking jumping bean on the gear. Up and down, up and down, couldn’t sit still, scratching his balls and his nose, yap yap yap yap yap.

I was getting pretty fucked-up veins, and the traces of chemicals probably didn’t help. I mean, I wasn’t Bayer or Hoechst, and sometimes I was in a bit of a hurry, so I often had trouble getting my cargo on board. It didn’t help to have O’Brien zipping around the room like a pinball. You needed to be calm when veins were hard to find.

But O’Brien was lovable, so it wasn’t really hard for Candy and me to put up with it. Even so, after the cooking had been happening for a while, it would sometimes take a long time to locate a vein. I’d get pretty wound up in that kind of situation. When I found myself feeling nostalgic for the early days of veins, I knew that things were really getting screwed up.

In the early days I took veins for granted. Veins were a means to an end, in the long run.

One night, for example, way back in Sydney, way back in the beginning, Candy and Lex and I had scored. Lex was drinking a can of Fanta. I’d opened the foil package and poured the dope onto the glass surface of the coffee table. It was a nice little mound of white powder, good dope from T-Bar. I don’t know what happened exactly. Lex moved to get more comfortable on the couch. His knee hit the edge of the coffee table, which shuddered once and jumped six inches.

The can of Fanta tipped. Before we could grab it, a drop or two had spilled out. Of course it landed on the heroin. The Fanta fizzed and the mound of heroin dissolved.

There was no decision process. The important thing was the heroin. We injected our bright orange carbonated hits. Lex laughed and sang the jingle: “When You’re Having Fun You’re Having Fanta.”

It was all easy back then. There were the veins that stuck out along my arms like ridges. Where are the veins of yesteryear? Then there were veins a bit deeper beneath the skin. But after a few years, by the time Candy and I were burning up, finding a vein became like a geological survey.

It had started slowly. I’d begun in the crook of the elbow, of course, like everybody else. I had a good while there, a year or two in the general vicinity. Gradually I moved toward the wrist. When I got too close to the wrist I went around the other side of the arm.

When that method came too close to the wrist again, I changed arms. I wrote with my left hand, I masturbated with my right, but necessity is the mother of invention and I was completely ambidextrous in the matter of syringes.

In the early years this chase around the arms wasn’t too bad, because I could always get a round off within a few minutes. It was the bigger delays that began to cause grief, and the delays began to get even bigger around the time of the cooking. I suppose you could pinpoint two reasons for this.

Firstly, once we started cooking, we went from having one or two or three or five shots a day to ten or fifteen or twenty. So frequency was a factor.

But secondly, there’s a chemical problem. Casper taught me a method of converting codeine to heroin that took about two hours. A proper extraction and drying of the heroin to powder form removed trace impurities but took another couple of hours. Why bother with that when you were just going to add water anyway and turn it back to the liquid you had two hours earlier?

The price, according to Casper, was minute traces of acetic anhydride left in the heroin. So we corroded our veins with acid. And one day, who knows, we might die of some mutant fucking cancer. But what a sweet Yellow Jesus it was.

I’d swing my arms around and around to get the circulation going. I’d dip my wrists in sinks of hot water. I’d prod and pierce until my arms were caked with dried trickles. Sometimes the syringe would become completely clotted with blood. Then I’d just have to give myself an intramuscular injection in the shoulder, and calm down, and start looking for a vein with a freshly loaded fit.

We started buying boxes of a hundred syringes, then five boxes at a time. I had to use a new pick every blast.

I moved down to my feet and ankles. It was virgin territory, gave me some breathing space for a while. There are certain places that hurt more than others, and the tops of the feet near the toes aren’t so good.

I was getting tiny veins and they would roll. I’d jack back on the syringe and get the thinnest suggestion of a trickle of blood. I figured after half an hour it would have to do. But as I began to push in, the skin would rise up in a ball, and I knew I was watching my heroin spread out under my flesh. There are many ways to describe frustration; this is a particularly good one.

In winter my feet would swell up. Shoes became too small for me, like when I was a kid and still growing. Eventually my feet were so fucked and swollen, I moved back up my body, to the northern latitudes. But available veins were getting scarcer.

I felt I was standing naked and cold in the middle of a vast forest at night, and wolves were moving in. I could hear my shallow, panicked breath above their baying.

I started making do with the insides of my wrists, the palms of my hands, the flesh between my fingers and around my knuckles. One week I found a good vein running along the back of the thumb. I was as happy as Larry for the four or five days it lasted.

But nothing could be relied on, and I felt that the world was a treacherous place, or that life, at least, was a treacherous thing. The way our bodies work. Candy shared these feelings, I’m sure. It’s a common slant on the world when you’re in love.

Everything was scarred. That was a way of viewing our lives too, though of course we never did.

The cooking was heaven and then it was hell. It was probably around the time I left my knuckles and went back down to the balls of my feet that Candy said, “We really ought to knock this on the head, go on methadone, you know, do something.”

But the big problem for me was not so much the veins. The real bummer was that we were using all this dope, more than we’d ever had, and yet it seemed we were feeling it less and less. As our habits rocketed up to new heights, so did our tolerance. Only when we had virtually unlimited dope did we finally get an idea of what chasing your tail means. Cooking gave us distance from the chaos, just a fraction. I stood back from my life and saw with horror that I’d just repeated the same day three thousand times. I vowed to myself that one of these years, sooner rather than later, I was going to stop.

In the meantime I developed the four-tourniquet method. At the end of each cook, when I could sit down at last, ready to hit up, I’d pull my four ties from under the couch. I’d take off my shoes and socks and roll my jeans up to the knees. One tie for each ankle and one for each arm, above the elbow. I’d pull them tight and begin my search.

The drill would be, say, two minutes left arm, two minutes left foot, two minutes right foot, two minutes right arm. Running my fingers softly over my skin, feeling for ridges that were rarely there. Like reading a page of Braille worn down by the years: the most popular book in the Braille school library. Shining a lamp in close, searching for a trace of blue on my white skin.

There were good days and bad days. Sometimes I’d even find a vein on the first cycle.

One night some equipment broke during a cook. This was cause for alarm. I’d just got the morphine up when the inner metal sleeve of the aspirator snapped off. It had finally corroded, from continual high-pressure use. The instant it happened, the flow of the vacuum was reversed. Water gushed into the 500 mil round-bottomed flask containing the morphine. The morph dissolved instantly, despite my lunge to disconnect the flask.

There were three regulars waiting in the lounge room, as well as Candy. I came out holding the flask, now three-quarters filled with the morphine solution. It was the usual strength, but spread through about 350 syringes’ worth of water. Being unfamiliar with these kinds of disasters, I wasn’t even sure if the stuff would work, or if somehow the morphine had been lost forever. It was the early days of cooking. I’d been getting better, but I was still essentially just a monkey with a recipe book.

I explained the dilemma. O’Brien, with the Eveready veins, volunteered to be guinea pig. I poured some of the liquid into a glass. He had two glasses in front of him: one with what we hoped was the dope, and one with water, for cleaning his fit.

He filled the syringe and hit up. Trains and tunnels. Bang. I watched jealously.

“Anything?” I asked.

He looked toward the ceiling. “Nothing.”

He cleaned his syringe and squirted it onto the carpet. He filled it again with the liquid and hit up. Candy and Victor and Yolanda and I sat mesmerized, waiting.

O’Brien’s veins were beautiful. He swiftly but patiently ran through his cycle: fill, inject, clean, fill, inject, clean. The same hole every time. After the eleventh hit he stopped for a moment. He looked to the ceiling again. He licked his lips.

“I think I’m feeling something,” he said.

There was a palpable buzz of excitement in the room.

“Let’s see your eyes,” Candy said. She leaned forward and peered into his pupils.

“Look!” she said. “They’re going pinned!”

“Shit, that’s good,” O’Brien said. “I can really feel it now, I’m getting stoned. Shit that’s a good fucking cook.”

He started to droop forward and scratch his nose.

Then it was a stampede. No one cared about the hygiene anymore. Everyone just started dipping their syringes into the main flask. Of course I knew I couldn’t possibly find all those veins, one after the other. I didn’t even bother trying. I gave myself fifteen musculars in a row. I spread them around on both shoulders, and Candy kindly gave me a few in the buttocks. I didn’t get the intravenous rush, but after about ten or fifteen minutes it was the same as any nice hit. Everyone sat around the lounge room spouting the warm crap that always came with mission accomplished.

One day, near the end, I got a small reprieve. It lasted a few months, until we finally went on methadone and threw away the lab in a moment of mad enthusiasm for an imagined future. I was soaping myself under the shower when I felt a vein on my stomach. I could see it too: thick and purple under my skin. I suppose by now I was so entirely fat-free that new, untapped veins could begin to appear. It was the femoral vein. It would be my friend for a while. I felt a degree of relief to rediscover easy access, like the good old early days. But all relief was temporary now, and time, or the sense of it, continued to shrink.

I’d mix up and fill the syringe. I’d have to stand in a shaft of sunlight, or sideways to a lamp. I’d drop my pants. The femoral vein cast a faint ridge of shadow from the light source. The vein seemed to originate somewhere beneath my rib cage, and ran down the left side of my stomach before disappearing into my pubic hair and groin.

It was a very comfortable position, to be able to operate the syringe with two hands. I’d cup it in the palm of my left hand with the needle facing back up toward me. I’d place the back of my left hand in the palm of my right hand, then rest my right hand on the flat of my stomach. I’d slide into the skin at a shallow angle and feel that discernible give, that change in texture, as the needle pushed through the skin and muscle and broke through into the cavernous cylinder of the femoral vein. Then push the plunger, whack it away, aloha Steve and Danno.

Veins are a kind of map, and maps are the best way to chart the way things change. What I’m really charting here is a kind of decay. The vein situation is no great exception. There really did come a point when we knew that our bodies were not in good order. That much was clear. As for our souls, well, we couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

Perhaps I could have gone on with the femoral vein forever. It certainly seemed nice and big. But I think in the end, with all those holes, you kind of do something. It’s like you have a container to hold your soul, and you turn it into a colander. So much of you leaks out, until there’s barely anything left. And you just keep lowering your standards, to deal with the barely anything.

You just leak away. And if you’re lucky, then one night in the silence, in the deep heart of the dark, you’ll hear the distant trickling of the blood in your veins. A weary world of rivers, hauling their pain through the dark heat. The heart like a tom-tom, beating the message that time is running out. You’ll lie there strangely alert. You’ll actually feel the inside of your body, which is your soul, or where your soul is, and a great sadness will engulf you. And from the sadness an itch might begin, the itch of desire for change.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 493