A CHANGE IS AS GOOD AS A HOLIDAY 2 page

“I understand that.”

“Now think. How can you get the money? Ring someone, get someone to put it in your bank account. It doesn’t matter how. If you don’t get the money I have no choice but to make life difficult for you.”

“There is one thing,” he said.

He was a creative thinker. He got the St. Kilda Road branch to ring his hometown branch. They handed him the phone over the counter and he spoke in familiar tones to the manager. I moved away to give him room, but I heard him say things like “urgent” and “a spot of bother, I can’t explain now.”

Finally I saw the look of relief on his face. He gave the phone back to the teller, who spoke to the country manager for a moment. In a couple of minutes Keith had his six hundred dollars. He walked outside the bank and he counted the notes out to me. I gave him his ring and driver’s license. Suddenly he was not important in my life.

“Well, I’m glad that’s all ended okay, then.” I tried to smile pleasantly. “We have to go now, Keith. Enjoy the rest of your time in Melbourne.”

I jumped into the car and pulled my seat belt over my shoulder. Candy leaned across me.

“Bye, Keith. Nice to meet you!”

And we drove away. Keith stood there, unshaven and uncertain, and then walked off in the opposite direction.

Later in the afternoon we lashed out and scored three grams off Lester. Lester was best when you bought the bigger amounts, but sometimes he took a little arranging. We returned the car to Jesse and gave him a little hit. He was happy.

We caught the tram back home from Jesse’s place at Carlton. We decided we’d ring the agency and take another night off, lie around and have lots of dope and watch TV and then get a big sleep.

But at about nine the intercom system rang. We weren’t expecting anyone and we looked at each other. Candy answered and I saw her eyebrows rise as she buzzed the security door open.

“It’s Kojak,” she said.

“Kojak? I wonder why.”

Kojak was a dealer Victor had put us onto. We hadn’t asked him to come around, so it didn’t really make sense. We didn’t owe him any money, we didn’t owe him any favors. We weren’t in any trouble with him, so we hoped his visit meant good news.

He came in with a pretty girl. Her eyes were lowered and she scowled at us by way of introduction. We could see she was hanging out for some gear. Her name was Lucy. She had short red hair and pale skin. Lovely green eyes, even with her huge pupils. She wasn’t all skin and bones, so she probably hadn’t been using for long. No more than a year or two. She was about twenty-five, a late starter.

Kojak didn’t use the dope he sold. He was in his mid-thirties, came from Malta or somewhere like that. Shaved his head, God knows why, drove a brand-new blue Commodore. Nonusing dealers, of course, were the scum of the earth, but Kojak was okay as far as nonusing dealers went. He was reliable, the deals were big, the dope was pretty good. The main reason he wasn’t high on our list of priorities was that he often didn’t respond to his pager for an hour or two.

“So how are you, Kojak?” I said. “What brings you here?”

“Can Lucy use your place for a shot?”

“Of course.”

“And after that, can we use your bedroom?”

I looked at Candy. She shrugged.

“Sure. Go right ahead.”

Lucy hit up and suddenly relaxed and became friendly and talkative. Obviously she had no cash and the deal was a hit for a fuck. We chatted for five minutes. Kojak asked us if we wanted to buy any dope and we said no, we had plenty, but maybe tomorrow. Then Kojak said to Lucy, “Let’s go,” and they went into our bedroom.

This hadn’t happened before.

“She seems nice,” Candy said.

“Yeah … yeah, she does.”

We stared at the TV for a few minutes. Then from the corner of my eye I noticed Candy’s head tilt toward me.

“Maybe we should go in there,” she said.

“Go in there? What do you mean?”

“Go in there. Join them.”

I looked her in the eye. I was trying to see if I understood her motives. There was no real reason to do it or not do it.

“I guess so,” I said.

“Lucy’s cute.”

I nodded agreement.

“Anyway,” she added, “it might be a good idea to get in good with Kojak.”

She was right about that. It was our duty, really, not to let an opportunity pass. In some strange way, if Kojak got an extra thrill, then he would owe us something, even if only a particularly good deal or leeway with credit sometime in the future. Besides, I felt a stirring of horniness for the novelty of the situation.

We tiptoed to the bedroom door and knocked. There was a pause.

“Yeah?” Kojak sounded surprised.

Candy opened the door and stuck her head around. “Would you mind if we came in and joined you?”

“Sure,” Kojak said.

“Sure,” Lucy said.

We went into the room. Lucy was lying on her side propped up on one elbow. She looked even more gorgeous with no clothes on. Kojak was sitting at the head of the bed, one leg tucked under him and one stretched to the floor. Obviously we’d interrupted Lucy sucking Kojak’s dick. Kojak was holding his erection in his hand. I had a quick glance and was glad it didn’t seem any bigger than mine.

We took our clothes off. Candy was naked in a flash. I took my time because I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to do. What would be appropriate. How things would pan out. All I knew was I felt tingly about Lucy and Candy, and nervous about the presence of Kojak. I just wasn’t into men; it seemed stupid to force anything.

Candy climbed onto the bottom end of the bed on her knees. From my point of view, everything was sexually charged. Candy’s butt was smooth and white and pointed up in the air toward me. When she moved her left knee forward to crawl toward Lucy, the curve of her pubis and the soft flesh of the inside of her thigh were exposed. It was an angle I hadn’t often seen. Anyway, all angles looked good when looking at Candy.

Lucy spread her legs and stretched her arms out. She clasped her hands around Candy’s neck and pulled her forward. They started tongue kissing. I was curious to see what Candy looked like kissing someone else. It was a luscious heroin-stoned meeting of wet lips and tongues. They writhed on each other’s bellies and their legs became all intertwined.

Kojak got his hands between them and was rubbing Lucy’s breasts. He moved his erect dick closer to their faces. Candy lifted her head away from kissing Lucy and started sucking Kojak.

I was naked by now and up on the bed. From above it would have looked like this: the two girls in the middle, Candy facedown on Lucy; Kojak in the vicinity of Candy’s right shoulder; me down around Candy’s left foot. The two men diagonally opposite.

Lucy had red pubic hair. I put my hand on her cunt. My arm from wrist to elbow was rubbing on Candy’s inner thigh. Candy cocked one leg over Lucy’s belly. Things were beginning to melt. I moved up to the left of the girls, level with their waists. I kept my hand on Lucy’s cunt, my fingers exploring, feeling how different it was from Candy’s. Lucy took her right hand from Candy’s breasts and started playing with my dick. I leaned forward and started kissing her. It had been a long time since I’d kissed anyone else. It was a delicious shock.

Lucy’s breath, Lucy’s lips, the smell of her—it all tasted different. I really wanted some time to get down there and check out her pussy, but even though our bodies were moving slowly and wetly, everything in my head was happening at a delirious high speed. From one second to another I had no idea what would happen next. Being a drug addict basically meant trying to control your universe at all costs; for me, then, this business in the bed was a novel experience of vertigo and abandon and free fall.

Kissing Lucy was like being lost in a dream. Six inches to my right Candy was sucking Kojak’s dick. Everything was cool. As in okay. I watched for a moment, intrigued by what Candy looked like doing that from an angle I’d never seen before. She had the double-chin thing on the downstroke, like in porn movies, but then I guess everyone does.

We rolled around a bit and positions changed. I spent a while licking Lucy down below, and Kojak tried to go through the Kama Sutra with Candy. I kept my eyes open because it was nice looking at the color of Lucy’s pubic hair up close, the way the red seemed to disappear against her flushed and swollen skin.

Then things changed again. Lucy was up on all fours and Candy was lying beneath her and sucking her breasts. Candy’s body came out sideways from under Lucy’s stomach. I couldn’t help thinking of a mechanic, the legs jutting out from under a car. A naked female mechanic.

I sat on my knees with my legs spread wide at the groin. I spread Candy’s legs and pulled her into position toward me, lifting her up by the buttocks. It was like the docking of the satellites. I fucked her—it felt real nice—while her ankles swayed gently around my shoulders and ears like long stalks of grass in a breeze. All the while she nuzzled Lucy’s breasts, hidden under there like she was changing a brake line.

Meanwhile Kojak had gone down the other end, to fuck Lucy from behind.

“Ow!” Lucy shouted. She reached her arm around and pushed at Kojak’s stomach, pushed him away from her arse. He’d been trying to stick his dick in her tradesmen’s entrance, no lube, no nothing.

“Not there you don’t,” Lucy said, admonishing him as she might a headstrong child.

Kojak didn’t complain. He just started fucking her in the designated area, and then things settled down into a quiet rhythm. Of course I was loaded on heroin and Kojak didn’t use, so in the staying-power stakes I wasn’t about to be challenged. After a few minutes Kojak grunted a few times and came. His whole demeanor changed then. His clothes were on before his dick had even deflated. He pulled on his shoes.

“I have to go,” he said, backing out the door. “I’ve got business to do. Bye-bye, beautiful girls.” He didn’t say a word to me. But I felt good about the matter. Kojak had gotten a thrill. I knew that at some point in the future he would probably give us a little dope on credit.

The hall door slammed as he went out. I had a moment of insecurity, as if I had no power here, as if everything would stop now. With Kojak in the room, it might have only been for show and profit. But Candy and Lucy seemed just as into it now as they were before. I decided to take the plunge and keep the momentum going.

I pulled out of Candy and lay on top of Lucy and we started kissing again. Candy and I were both used to each other. I guess in a way we were both fighting over Lucy, who was new and unknown. But it was a friendly kind of rivalry. Candy started licking Lucy’s pussy. Lucy said, “It’s good now Kojak’s gone,” and I could hardly believe my ears.

Just the three of us. The situation began to dawn on me.

Really, this was paradise as far as I was concerned. That’s not exactly true: heroin was paradise. But me alone, naked, in a room with naked Candy and naked Lucy—our sole purpose to have sex, to do things with each other—well, I have to say I was pretty fucking happy.

It’s funny, though, I did feel a little strange about putting my dick in Lucy with Kojak’s sperm so recently deposited up there. But I got over that. We tried a whole lot of positions and three-way variations. There’s a chance on heroin that you’ll just never come, you’ll fuck and fuck and finally give up. But I was stretched to the limit of what being horny could possibly mean. I was sure something was in the offing.

In the end I was fucking Lucy in the missionary position and Candy was down between our legs, doing whatever with Lucy and licking my balls and scrotum. I’d never experienced the luxury of an extra tongue. Being on heroin was always like winning the lottery, but coming on heroin was like winning it twice.

My life was a lot like a cartoon, so it wasn’t surprising that I actually saw bands of stars swirling in front of my eyes and around my head for five or ten seconds at the peak of things. Then we all collapsed in a pile for a while.

I knew the next thing I wanted was a nice big blast. We had enough dope to keep our chins superglued to our chests for a good few hours. I felt so full of benevolence, I was tempted to offer Lucy some. But I realized that was taking things too far.

“Did Kojak leave you some gear, Lucy?” I asked.

“Yeah, there’s a little bit,” she said. Then she added nervously, “But only enough for me, really.”

“Oh no, that’s okay, it’s just that we don’t have enough to give you any,” I lied. “I just didn’t want you to feel left out.”

The three of us went back into the lounge room and mixed up. We all got completely wasted. For many hours we couldn’t even open our eyes to watch TV. We just dribbled a lot and mumbled shit that nobody understood. We burned holes in the sofa and on the carpet when our cigarettes, lit but unsmoked, suspended in our hands, smoldered down to long cylinders of ash as we drooped toward slack-jawed unconsciousness. It was the best kind of domestic bliss, the absolute absence of discomfort.

At dawn I woke to kids’ cartoons. Candy was asleep. Lucy had gone, leaving a note that said, “Nice to meet you both, see you soon.” Three weeks later Kojak told us he’d heard she’d gone to rehab. We never saw her again.

COLIN GETS LUCKY

Every now and then, despite the money, Candy got pissed off with the hard slog of prostitution. We’d try to make a go of dealing, so she could work a little less sometimes. We never reached great heights. Just kept using all that extra gear.

Lack of foresight would get us into trouble. It’s a lack of foresight to use a day’s worth of dope in one shot. Equally, it’s a lack of foresight to plan to stop when deep down you know that you can’t. The best intentions mean fuck all.

At such times you find yourselves adrift in anxiety, unprepared once more for the onslaught of stomach cramps and the hideous sweat, wandering the city with vague thoughts of shoplifting. This was problematic on a midwinter Sunday, when Melbourne was empty and windswept, like a scene from The Omega Man.

Candy and I were walking down Little Bourke Street, discussing who we could call and what story we could use to get some money. Then the gods intervened. We walked past a bank of phone booths, and one of them began to ring. We looked at each other. It was an odd event. Candy picked up the phone and I leaned in to listen.

“Hello?”

“Hello? Who’s that?”

“Who’s that?”

“This is Colin.”

“Hi, Colin.”

“Who’s that?”

“This is Candy.”

“Is that Lifeline? I want to speak to a counselor.”

“No, this is Candy. I think you’ve got the wrong number. What number did you try to ring?”

“So this is not Lifeline? Who are you?”

“I’m Candy.”

“Oh … So I guess I’ve got the wrong number.”

“What’s the problem, Colin? Why do you want to ring Lifeline?”

I gave Candy the thumbs-up. Someone in distress, or in an erratic state, could mean someone erratic enough to part with some money. Candy was thinking the same way. We almost always did.

“Oh, I’m just not feeling too good. I don’t know … Where are you?”

“I’m in a phone booth in Little Bourke Street.”

“A phone booth … no, you’re kidding me.”

“No, I’m not. You called a phone booth. Listen.” She held the phone outside the booth. “Hear the traffic? I’m in a phone booth. I swear.”

“That’s incredible,” he said. “Wow.”

“So, Colin, what is there to be so depressed about?”

“Well, everything, really. My wife hates me, I hate my job. I hate my life.”

“Where do you work?”

“In a pie factory in Preston.”

“Do you have many friends?”

“No, not any, really.”

“Maybe you could be my friend.”

“Why, what are you like?”

“I’m really nice.” She oozed such confidence when she said it.

“How old are you? What do you look like?”

“I’m twenty-four. I’ve got long blond hair. How old are you?”

“I’m thirty-two.”

“Well, maybe we should meet! I mean, what a bizarre coincidence, me walking past just at this moment and the phone ringing like that!”

“Sure, that sounds great. I can’t believe it. It is a coincidence! Well, when could we meet?” We could feel Colin’s mood, his day, his life, changing.

“I don’t know. I’m not doing anything … I suppose we could even meet today.”

“That’d be fantastic! I can’t believe it. One minute I feel like killing myself and the next minute I’ve met someone really interesting.”

“Oh, now you don’t want to go killing yourself. Otherwise you’d miss out on interesting meetings like this. But listen, I’ve just remembered something. I’d love to meet up with you today, but I’m desperately searching for some money to help a friend out. It’s a bit of an emergency. Something’s come up. It’s difficult to explain. But I tell you what, if you could lend me some money, then we could meet up today, and I could pay you back tomorrow.”

There was a short silence.

“What, you want to borrow some money off me?”

“Yeah. That way we’d have an excuse to see each other twice in two days. What do you think?”

“I’m not sure … how much do you need?”

He was faltering. Candy had to act fast.

“I need two hundred dollars. Listen, you could come straight into town now. Where do you live?”

“Coburg.”

“Right. You could just jump on a tram, be here in half an hour. We could go for a walk through the park, or a tram ride, go to a café. It’d be loads of fun.”

“Well …”

“Listen, the money’s not a problem. My friend, the girl who needs it, is giving it back to me tomorrow. So as I said, we could meet again tomorrow.”

“Why does she need it in such a hurry?”

“It’s really hard to explain. It’s personal. I promised her I’d help her. But trust me, it’s very important. A one-day loan. How can that hurt you?”

“Well … I guess I could.…”

“Yeah! It’ll be great. I’m dying to meet you already. You sound really interesting.”

“Okay, then, where shall we meet?”

Candy smiled at me. I punched the air in silent joy. I couldn’t believe she’d pulled it off. One minute we’d felt like killing ourselves and the next we’d met someone really interesting!

The plan was this: Candy would meet Colin at the Bourke Street Mall. She’d take him on a get-to-know-you tram ride, one circuit around the city center. Have a quick coffee at the very most.

We’d done a flit from Queens Road after we didn’t pay the rent for a couple of months, and now lived in the middle of the city, in a decrepit warehouse in a back lane. Candy would get rid of him within the hour. Then we’d leave straightaway to score. It was my job to arrange for the drugs.

Everything was perfect. Within two hours of the phone ringing we’d gotten two hundred dollars from a perfect stranger, got loaded, and prevented a suicide into the bargain. We felt good.

Candy told me about Colin. He was short, and he wore shorts, with white socks to the knees. A zip-up green parka kept him warm. His hair was greasy. He had dandruff and acne scars. He wore thick bottle-lens glasses that magnified his eyes disturbingly.

“It was so cruel,” she said, not knowing whether to laugh or cover her mouth.

“We got the money. That’s the point,” I said.

“He said he’d never met anyone like me.”

“Well, that’s got to be worth two hundred dollars,” I said. “Is he worth more?”

“Maybe just a few times. I mean, it’s not like he’s rich. I think he just saves his wages. I’d better play it careful. String him along. He’s pretty thick. Not all there.”

Over the next couple of months, somehow, unbelievably, we continued to get money out of Colin. Candy never fucked him. She never did more than meet him for a tram ride or a coffee. She never allowed him to see our place or know our address.

Somehow, the previous debt would be wiped, and then it was just the new problem of trying to get money out of him today, as if it were the first time.

I think Colin was falling in love. Candy told him she was an artist and that she lived in a complex of studios shared by other artists. Our phone, according to Candy, was the communal phone for all these bohemians. Candy said she lived alone in her studio and she didn’t have a boyfriend.

I was therefore the gay friend who lived in the adjoining studio. That’s why I answered the phone so often. Colin tried to have long conversations with me, digging for information about this incredible girl he had met. I fueled his curiosity with praise for her uniqueness. I sprinkled my praise with hints about her availability. I insinuated that she was unlucky in love and was really just looking for that “special man.”

I would ration her. Just to make him tense. A little bit of edginess and anticipation can go a long way in a guy like Colin.

We’d be having a good day. Lots of dope. Lots of money. The phone would ring.

“Hi, Colin!” I’d say warmly and loudly, looking across the warehouse floor to Candy.

She’d motion to me with her arms, No way!

“Mate, what a shame, you’ve just missed her. I heard her go out a few minutes ago.”

I mean, the guy worked in a pie factory. He’d probably saved a thousand dollars in four years. We really had to reserve him for emergency days. Other than that, we didn’t want him invading our lives.

Just when he thought his princess had left his life forever, she would call him, trying to act casual. He’d given Candy his home number. God knows what his wife thought.

Candy would keep the excuses coming, stories of misery. He was the only one who could help her, she’d say. On three or four occasions over two or three months, she got a couple of hundred out of him. And then eventually, as happens with johns, his patience began to wear thin.

When that time comes you bring out the secondary ammunition: tell the truth and see what happens.

On a dark, despairing Sunday, Candy changed tactics. I put my ear close to the phone.

“But I don’t understand,” Colin whined. “You’re always in trouble with money.”

Candy sighed. The sigh said: You are about to be the recipient of momentous news. You’d better be grateful.

“Colin,” she said, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. I’m having a lot of problems. I’m a heroin addict.”

“A heroin addict!”

I don’t think Colin had ever experienced such drama in his life. I imagined his heart pounding with this new excitement.

“I know,” Candy said. “It’s terrible.”

“A heroin addict! Well, that explains so much! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was so embarrassed. I’ve been trying so hard to stop, so we can have a better relationship together.” She chose her words carefully. “You know, a better friendship.”

“Well, why don’t you just stop?”

“It’s not that easy, Colin. It’s not that simple. There are some very heavy people chasing me for money. Once I get the debt out of the way, then I can start to think about stopping.”

“But how much money do you need?”

“Look, I need thousands. But, darling, it’s not your problem, it’s not your concern. I have to deal with this myself. I wouldn’t dream of asking you to help me with thousands. It’s just that today, it’s a real emergency. They want two hundred as an installment.”

I was scribbling furiously on a pad: “To show good faith.”

“You know, to show them my good faith. Or they’ll hurt me.”

“My God,” Colin said. “What sort of people are these?”

“You don’t want to know, Colin. You really don’t want to know. Will you help me, Colin? Can you help me?”

She sounded like some helpless heroine in Gone with the Wind. I would have laughed, only trying to get money for drugs was no laughing matter.

And somehow, yet again, we pulled it off. She pulled it off.

But once you’d gone into the reserve plan, you knew the end was in sight. You could now hustle someone like Colin without having to hide your sheer desperation. This was quite a relief. But it could only work a few more times, because now you were expected to take some kind of action, like going to a detox or drying out in the country. And of course you never did.

Some weeks later the thing came grinding to a pathetic halt. The final thing you do in the face of adamant refusals is get nasty.

We were sick. I sat on the couch listening to the conversation with a sinking feeling in my gut. Who else could we try?

Candy was hissing things like, “Surely you’ve got something in your house you can sell!” I knew the cause was lost.

I picked up my pocket phone book. I opened it at ABC. I ran my finger down the page. Greg Anderson. Who the fuck is Greg Anderson? As I began to concentrate on the new task at hand, I tuned out of Candy’s lost battle.

The last thing I remember her saying was, “Listen, we’ll come around and pick up your washing machine.”

But Colin drew the line. Colin had more dignity than that.

About household appliances, at least.

FREEBASING

Colin was a freak occurrence. I mean, the public phone, the way it all happened: the odds were remote. Still, when you open yourself to the possibility of weird money or quick money, it’s bound to happen every now and again. That’s how we got into Tucker’s coke deal.

There was a time when cocaine was a drug I liked. I was young and full of beans. I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, and selling lots of hash and pot.

The money began to roll in. The amounts I was dealing got bigger and bigger. I was like a small business, expanding from the ground up. The kind of thing the government would have been proud of. It was a vibrant, golden time, full of excitement and unlimited opportunity. There wasn’t a single sign on the horizon of imminent downturn.

As I started doing bigger amounts of grass, I started making connections with people who were older and better-traveled down the drug path. Cocaine appeared, and before long I was buying it by the ounce and selling by the gram. Along the way I learned to freebase. It was a necessary business practice. If you weigh a given amount of cocaine before and after turning it to base, you can work out its purity.

Eventually things got out of hand, as they do with the yip-yap drugs. I succumbed a little too much to the unstoppable madness of freebasing and ended up owing a couple of people a lot of money. But that was a few years earlier, and Candy hadn’t been in the picture then.

With Candy and me, hammer was the all-consuming thing. We were both firmly of the opinion that cocaine was a serious pussy drug, or at least among people silly enough to snort it. Freebasing, of course—crack, as it was coming to be known by the time I met Candy—was a different matter. A very fucked-up way of life, for those who like their pleasure hard and fast and endlessly repeated rather than our way, hard and slow and endless. A fucked-up way to fuck up.

But a lot of people liked coke, and there was market value in that.

Candy and I looked bad enough that yuppies wanting to rough it for a while in coke dealing could believe we had some cred; but not so fucked-up and tattooed and toothless that they didn’t trust us.

I never actively looked for cocaine business, but occasionally something would pop up that warranted some middle-manning. Some shifty coke brokering.

Tucker was a muso who sometimes bought our smack. He was one of those types who had been the drummer for Dragon or John Farnham, some shit like that, fifteen years earlier, and was stupid enough to boast about it.

Tucker was like a gun for hire at cheesy club gigs now. Once, I’d delivered some dope to him at the Starlight Club. The band was dressed in frayed but matching baby-blue tuxedos with flared trousers. Tucker was listlessly attacking his drum kit to a rather haunting version of “Girl from Ipanema” as boozy seniors bored with bingo stared into their drinks. I guess I would want some heroin too, under such circumstances. But he was a little sad, the way he hadn’t had a habit in ten years and tried to hold things together in that pathetic I’m-not-on-methadone-but-I’m-not-going-to-let-things-fuck-up way.

Anyway, there was some big pie he had his fingers in. Or maybe not so big, but big enough for us. Ten ounces of coke at a good price, and everyone could make a little cash. I knew a keen buyer, through O’Brien, and one thing led to another. But everything was subject to the purity of the coke. And Tucker, who had freebased before but didn’t actually know how to cook it up, wanted me to be the tester.

He also wanted to use our warehouse. Fuck it, we couldn’t say no to a quick cash injection. It was worth a thousand bucks, just to be there and test the coke. Tucker was pretty nervous. There was more in it for him. He even came around to the warehouse earlier in the day. He swept and dusted and put flowers in a vase.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 653