PROBLEMS WITH DETACHABLE HEADS: 2

The itch of desire for change. Even farce, in the end, seemed to be pointing toward the idea of change. Farcical situations, like the Carl’s Neck Situation. By the time I was Scientist of the Year, I wasn’t expecting to come across too many people with a vein problem like mine. Then I met Carl, and was reminded that there’s always somebody worse off than you.

I grew to feel a deep sense of camaraderie with Carl in the few short weeks that he was in our lives, between stints at Pentridge Prison. I’d do a nice cook and everyone would hit up, whack whack whack whack, and get relaxed and chatty, and there’d be Carl and me fretting and prodding for half an hour, sometimes forty-five minutes.

Carl was wiry and pale, with red hair and red freckles and lots of tattoos. He was Yolanda’s sometime boyfriend. Candy had met Yolanda in a brothel a couple of years earlier, where they’d often gone for the big cash kill and done doubles together, the blonde and the brunette.

Candy and O’Brien and Yolanda or whoever would be scratching their noses and smoking cigarettes in that languorous way you do when the smack comes on. They’d be sitting there going “mmmm” and complimenting me on my cook while I was the Grand Chef with the blocked esophagus, unable to taste his own food. So Carl was special, like a vein buddy in the brotherhood of suffering.

We could swap stories and hints. We could be like a support group. My name’s Carl and I’ve got no veins. I’ve had no veins for four years now. Welcome Carl. You’ve come to the right place.

Around this time I’d been to see Doctor Feelgood for my regular backup kit visit, and in his waiting room I’d read an old National Geographic with a cover story about opium. It was one of those comprehensive vacuous bullshit things that National Geographic does, a sort of Disney version of the drug world.

There was a photo of a black woman leaning in close to a mirror and puffing her cheeks out and sticking a syringe into her neck. The caption called her a “New York City heroin addict” and explained that she was puffing her cheeks out to try and get a vein up on her neck.

I was struck by this novel idea. I thought of Carl, but of course I thought mostly of myself. I ripped out the page and put it in my wallet. That night, or maybe the next night, Carl was around.

Candy and I had been using way too much of our smack—even with the luxury of cooking, our need, as always, continued to outstrip our means—and not selling much, not keeping the turnover going.

It was becoming pretty rare for Candy to work. I almost felt like the man of the house, supplier of smack and other essential nutrients. But we still basically lived hand-to-mouth, always going for lots of hammer rather than lots of money. The odd cash injection was sometimes necessary to pay the rent or bills. One night Candy went off to work a shift so we could stock up on some expensive chemicals that were about to run out.

I was alone and chilling out in front of the TV when Carl dropped by, cashed up and hanging out, at about two A.M. I’d had a big hit at midnight and then settled in to watch the late movie, They Died with Their Boots On, starring Errol Flynn as General Custer. Candy was due home about five.

Of course, I had my morning blast, and Candy’s too, hidden away, and of course I felt some sympathy for Carl, begging me all snivelly and wide-eyed for a taste, but personal principles were personal principles and I would never give my morning taste to my dying grandmother, or even to Candy. Some things you had to feel secure about. Anything could go wrong.

“Haven’t you got anything, mate? Just a smidge?”

“Nothing. Not a thing,” I said. “I was going to cook when we woke up.”

“If you could cook now,” he pleaded, “I’ll owe you big-time.”

“Mate, it’s after two already. Can’t you just go home and sleep and when you wake up the dope’ll be ready?”

“I won’t be able to sleep. You know that.”

There were fine beads of sweat all over his desperate, sad face.

More dope, I thought. Why fucking not? I already had enough packets of Panadeine capsules for the next cook.

“All right,” I sighed. “I’ll do a cook.”

His shoulders sagged in relief and his face lit up. It looked pathetic. I’d been there many times myself.

“But it’s a fucking hassle, Carl,” I continued sternly. “So here’s the deal. You give me eighty bucks for two nice tastes. And you come back later today with seven large packets, and after that cook I’ll give you another taste to pay for the packets.”

“No problems,” he said. “No worries. You’re a champion.”

“Let’s get shelling, then,” I said.

I was not in a major hurry like Carl, but the way I saw it, that was essentially his problem and not mine. I was a happy cook, all cells well fed. I was feeling no real lack of anything just at that moment. I took my time and did a nice careful cook, more than two hours, everything done just right. Carl sat at the kitchen table chewing his nails and smoking lots of cigarettes and trying to act like he was enjoying chatting with me.

At four-thirty A.M., I did the demethylation and got the morphine up. Heaps of morph in the flask, a good-looking cook. I squeezed out a couple of pipettes of acetic anhydride to dissolve the morphine. I whacked on the vacuum aspirator and held the flask over the flame.

There was a luscious amount of heroin oil. Carl was almost salivating. I added the water and the drop of glacial acetic acid and dissolved it all. I poured it into my little jar and we moved back out into the lounge room.

“Got a pick, Carl?”

He fumbled in his jacket pocket and pulled out a syringe. It was a 1 mil detachable head and it looked a little the worse for wear. I looked closely at it. The calibrations had all worn off. I raised my eyebrows at Carl.

“You been camping, mate?” I asked.

He managed a weak laugh but he was pretty preoccupied, what with concentrating so fiercely on my hands and his syringe and my jar of heroin.

I dipped the needle in and pulled back the plunger and half filled his works. It was a guessing game. I wouldn’t know precisely how strong the gear was until I got it on board myself. I filled my own syringe and the Carl and Me Show began.

I pulled out my tourniquet collection from under the couch.

“Help yourself,” I offered with a sweep of my arm. “And Carl,” I added in a serious voice.

He looked up.

“Good luck,” I said.

I laughed, because I was full of heroin already, and I’d got a vein first go on my last hit. It didn’t really matter if I had a little trouble. Carl, on the other hand, was really stressed.

We started fucking around, looping the ties tight around our arms, and the next thing we know the late late late movie is over and the five A.M. shit is on TV and a thin trace of gray light is leaking through the blinds.

We’d been concentrating hard for half an hour and there were dried trickles of blood all over our arms and I was saying, “Fuck this, fuck this,” when I remembered the National Geographic.

I stopped what I was doing and pulled from my wallet the page with the photo of our New York comrade.

“Check this out,” I said to Carl. I pointed at the relevant photo.

Carl studied it and then read the caption.

“Fuckin’ all right,” he said. He started nodding. “Fuckin’ all right. Let’s do it.”

In a minute we had the mirror set up on the mantelpiece and the photo pinned up above us as a guide. A visual aid. The photo was grainy like it was some cinema verité shit, so it was a little hard to find the kind of clinical detail we needed. It was hard to see what she was actually doing with the needle and her neck.

We were really just stabbing in the dark.

I admit I thought about my jugular or aorta or artery or whatever the fucking thing was, but I figured there had to be veins there as well, just the normal little domestic fellows. I was tilting my head back and puffing my cheeks out and going in shallow, so the syringe was almost parallel to the line of my neck.

I was not finding anything, just adding more trickles of blood all over my neck. Carl was almost beside himself by this time.

“Maybe it’s not as easy as it looks,” I suggested.

I glanced at Carl’s reflection beside mine. He was going in deep, at a right angle to his neck.

Just at that moment Candy’s keys slipped into the door and it swung open. Carl got a shock and jumped a bit and tried to swing his head around to see where the noise was coming from. He was trying to hold the syringe in place with his left hand, but his feet were awkwardly placed and he must have pushed it in a bit farther.

I’d finally got a tiny spurt of blood back into my syringe so I was really concentrating on securing the services of that vein.

Candy walked in the room and her mouth dropped open.

“What the—” she started to say.

Then something happened that I’d never seen before.

With astonishing force, Carl’s syringe shot out of his neck and out of his hand like an arrow from a bow and zoomed across the room and out through the door to the kitchen, where I heard it ping on one of my bottles of chemicals.

In that first microsecond you could see Carl’s confusion as his brain tried to link the apparently poltergeistal activity of his syringe with the source of the noise at the door.

A jet of blood had spurted from Carl’s neck and hit the opposite wall, spraying back out in a circle at the point of impact like a high-pressure hose. And then the jet’s path continued across the room toward Candy.

Candy screamed and dropped to the floor, trying to avoid the gusher. It passed above her but her hair was sprayed with a fine mist of blood. It continued past the door and sprayed a jagged red line across the cream blinds as Carl turned a full circle.

“What’s going on!” he shouted. There was raw fear in his high-pitched voice.

I had no idea what the fuck to do. Was this what happened in combat in Vietnam, everything slow motion and surreal? My wounded buddy Candy on the ground, and me trying to avoid the tracer fire coming from Carl’s neck?

Carl had gone all Wes Craven, all Freddy Krueger. Carl had gone ballistic. There was blood spouting all over the room, making a high-speed pitter-patter sound on the walls.

He must have thought that the best way out of this would be to faint. He lurched across the room, his knees wobbling. I could see him losing his balance and tottering sideways. All the while the blood kept spraying out of him. He looked like Frankenstein in a dying frenzy. One of the bolts on Frankenstein’s neck had come loose and he was coming apart at the seams and roaring like a wounded animal. A stuck pig, an elephant, thrashing around the room; a demented child scribbling on a spirograph board, coloring everything wildly red.

I was in a defensive crouch by now, over beside the TV. Carl buckled at the knees and fell sideways to the floor and started to give the ceiling a spray. The blood came in ferocious spurts. Carl’s eyelids were fluttering like some lame Emily Brontë shit. His head was moving purposefully toward the carpet like he was trying to get his ears down there and listen to the fleas. The wondrous music of the fleas which would deliver him from fear.

“Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh!”

He started wailing in terror. He was holding his hand to his slippery red neck and he looked just like Robert de Niro at the end of Taxi Driver. Only in Taxi Driver, de Niro was sitting there covered in blood and holding his neck and looking pretty calm. Almost happy. Carl didn’t look calm. They were just in the same position, that’s all.

All of this, the whole thing from Candy opening the door to Carl collapsing on the floor, had taken ten or fifteen seconds. I had visions of Carl’s imminent death and assumed an ambulance would need to be called on this one. I imagined it would take a little explaining.

It was then it clicked. I was staring at his neck, my eyes focusing on the point where the blood erupted between his fingers like an oil strike. Jesus, I’m thinking of movies. James Dean in Giant.

I stared at the gusher and realized that the blood was not coming directly from his neck, but from the small piece of plastic between his fingers. The detachable head. The detachable head! Carl was in shock. He was holding the detachable head in place with his hand! He’d tapped into the main torrent taking blood to the brain, the most powerful vein in the body, and he’d created a berko fire hydrant in my lounge room. He was still holding the detachable head firmly in place, because he was a little panicked, and maybe also because he was a bit of a fucking idiot.

He’d tapped into an artery and blown the body of his syringe into kingdom come, into my kitchen. You would only truly be able to see something like that in super slow motion, like on a nature documentary, the way they show you a hummingbird in flight. Carl’s syringe on its final journey upriver. It was a plumbing mishap of epic destructive force. And then, while unleashing the destruction, he’d had the bad manners to collapse on us.

I guess Carl’s reptilian brain had taken over from the higher functions. He was keeping his fingers on that detachable head because, come hell or high water, he’d found a fucking vein, all right.

I grabbed a pillow off the couch and dived across the room and ripped his hand and the detachable head away from his neck. The blood continued to spurt out of the hole. I smothered the side of his head with the pillow, pushing down hard where his neck was.

“Get me a towel or something!” I yelled at Candy.

She ran into the kitchen and came back and threw a washcloth at me. I removed the pillow. The blood was still flowing freely, still pulsing, but it was no longer spurting to the other side of the room. Carl, however, continued to scream hysterically. It was five in the morning and I had a heroin lab in the kitchen and I was a little bit worried about the neighbors and hysterical noises and the police.

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” I hissed.

“Oh God! Oh fuck! Oh Jesus!” he gurgled.

I slapped him hard with a backhander across the face. It was almost a punch. I guess it was a punch. I guess I was kind of hyped up.

His nose began to bleed. Another gusher.

“Ahh shit!” I looked over at Candy.

She was gathering her senses. Composing herself. Unsus-pending her disbelief. The room looked like it had been used for a serious Satanic ritual—say, disembowelment or child sacrifice.

She was not real happy corning home to this.

“What the fuck did you two think you were doing?” It wasn’t the right time to be asking questions.

I was holding Carl’s head in my lap, pressing the washcloth to his neck and stroking his bloodied hair. He was blubbering gently. I think we looked like some gay fringe theater version of the Pietà.

“We couldn’t get a vein. We just thought …”

There was nothing for me to say beyond the obvious. Still, I hated that. Candy standing there with her hands on her hips and giving me the steel eyeball. Okay. I made a mistake.

Carl wasn’t an idiot. He was just a very distraught junkie. I felt tender toward him for a moment. I decided I would waive the forty bucks for his lost hit. Then I remembered my own blast. I’d forgotten about it in all the excitement. I scanned the floor and saw my syringe in the corner. It appeared to be undamaged by the fracas.

“Listen, Candy,” I said. “I did a big cook. We’ve got lots of gear. Let’s just all get really stoned, and calm down, and send Carl off in a cab to the hospital to get checked, and then clean up a little.”

She was starting to smile, like it was so stupid being angry.

“What do you reckon?” I added.

She sighed and walked out into the kitchen. She came back with a saucepan of warm water and another washcloth and walked across the room and crouched down to Carl. She peered at him intently.

“You okay, Carl?”

“I’m sorry, Candy, I’m so sorry,” Carl moaned.

“Hey, it’s nothing, little Carly,” she soothed. “These things happen. Here, let me wipe you down.”

She cradled him and sat him up and gently started cleaning him with the water. She looked over to me.

“How about a nice big blast for all of us, baby?”

“Yeah right,” I said.

I snapped into action. Heroin jar. Terumo box.

“Hey, Carl,” I said. “I’ll give you a nice new syringe.”

He managed a feeble laugh.

God was being extra-special nice to him now because Candy looked for a vein behind his knee, where she sometimes found one for me, and hit him up no problems and he was wasted, seriously wasted. A very happy Carl. I gave him a lot of dope, to make up for his ordeal. His lips even went a bit blue in the first five minutes and Candy had to slap him around a bit to keep him on the active list.

His neck stopped bleeding and in the end he didn’t want to go to the hospital, even though you could see there was going to be a big purple bruise, like an apple lodged in his throat or a gland gone crazy. Instead he hung around with us and we made him help us clean the lounge room.

He was really grateful that we’d given him so much dope and been okay about the blood. His nose wasn’t broken and he didn’t seem resentful about that either. He volunteered for all the hard work, like standing on a stool and scrubbing the ceiling. We put a tape on the cassette player—Funky Kingston by Toots and the Maytals—and it turned out to be kind of fun, being that stoned and getting into a cleaning rhythm. In the end the walls were cleaner than they’d ever been, though it took us half a day.

No one had slept, so we all felt a bit fucked-up, but we just used dope all day and cooked again and went to bed a bit earlier that night.

Two weeks later Carl got done again. He parked his car in Carlton and walked around the corner and held up a bakery with a plastic replica pistol. The two old Vietnamese women freaked for a minute and gave him the money from the cash register. He was a wiry little nugget but he could give you a fright when his voice got going.

He had the money in one hand and the pistol in the other and he was ranting and raving about “don’t follow me or I’ll blow your fucking brains out” when he brought the gun down hard on the counter. The plastic splintered and the gun broke in half.

Carl ran out of the shop and down the street. The two old ladies chased him around the corner with their brooms. They watched him get into his car and they had plenty of time to memorize his license plate as he tried to disentangle his thumb from the broken plastic pistol and search his various pockets for his car keys. His car keys. Not a stolen car. His own car. When we are talking about Carl, we are not talking about a sophisticated criminal. But then again, I did the great GPO heist.

Maybe he spent the cash register, I don’t know. The cops got him within hours. He’d worn out his welcome in the courts, and he got two years for this one.

We never saw him again. Six months later Yolanda told us he’d got into a fight in Pentridge and someone sliced him open with a knife. Carl was pretty vague, she said, about the details and the reasons. Two weeks after he got back from the prison hospital, he hanged himself in his cell.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 637