A CHANGE IS AS GOOD AS A HOLIDAY 3 page

I didn’t like the two guys selling it, but then those coke and heroin worlds didn’t intersect a great deal, not down at our level. The buyer was some film guy, some pansy fucking producer or something, and I felt sorry for him, because he was extremely nervous and not doing a good job of hiding it.

He brought his girlfriend along, like he was confident and casual and did this kind of thing all the time. But I could see the way saliva, what little of it there was, kept sticking in his throat. And the way he licked his lips, and the way his voice came out croaky or high-pitched a few times. It reminded me of what happened to my own voice and my saliva whenever I got arrested.

So there was me and Candy and the two Richmond gangsters (semi-gangsters, at least) and Film Boy and his babe (he’d met her when she was the talent in a yogurt commercial he shot) and Tucker, who was frantically introducing everyone and cracking dumb jokes which are not worth recalling.

The scene was not unpleasant but it was not really relaxed either. We all just wanted to get the deal done and get back to our normal lives: Candy and I to hitting up smack; the semi-gangsters to extorting money from cheesy nightclubs or whatever they did; Film Boy and Babe to showing off to all their filmic friends and learning how to turn a potential profit into a disastrous septum-corroding loss; and Tucker, king for just an evening, to being the sad ferret he was.

Because I was testing the dope, I was this kind of neutral link who both sides were looking to for assurance. Film Boy, in particular, was relying on me to give the okay.

Everyone sat down and Semi-Gangster One pulled out the bag and plonked it on the table. Film Boy looked at me like I was going to tell him how pure it was just by looking at it. He had no fucking idea.

“Go ahead, it’s your deal,” I said. “Check it out.” I was giving him a heavy prompt. I had to help the poor bastard out.

He reached over and took the bag. He dipped his finger in and tasted it on his tongue and teeth.

“Tastes all right,” he said. “Let’s have a line.”

He pulled a razor blade from his pocket and scooped out a couple of mounds. He laid out seven thick lines on a mirror. He rolled up a fifty-dollar note and snorted a line. Then he passed the mirror around. It was really just a ritual of politeness. Probably only Babe was genuinely excited, in a positive sense. As opposed to edgy, like the rest of us.

The coke tasted all right on my gums. I woofed down the snort. I hated that jerky little nyang-nyang thing it did in your brain. Anyway, it had been so long since anything had gone up through my nose, I didn’t really know if this batch was any good or not. What the fuck was a snort supposed to do?

Snorting was silly when you were about to buy ten ounces. The base test was the only way to go.

The conversation sped up for thirty seconds, as it does when people are snorting, and everyone seemed to be speaking at once. Film Boy was weighing the coke on his brand-new electronic scales and being a real suck about how good it seemed. The semi-gangsters were relaxing a little and lapping it all up. Tucker was agreeing with everything everyone said. Candy just sat there smiling.

I really wanted these people out of my house.

“Let’s get testing,” I suggested.

We all moved over to the far corner of the warehouse, where there was a sink and a stove, a space that vaguely resembled a kitchen. We sat around the table. There weren’t enough chairs. Film Boy perched on a milk crate so that only his head was visible above the table. He probably felt as awkward as he looked.

I’d gone out and bought a little glass pipe from a bong shop and some gauze from the hardware store. I’d made myself a good-looking base pipe. No use wasting the test rock.

I set up my diamond scales. Everyone watched the process. There were some nice rocks in the bag but basically it had been powdered pretty well, and it’s the powder that you want to test from, because that’s where the sugar will be.

I dug deep into the bag with a teaspoon and stirred it around. I pulled out a few small amounts from different parts, what I thought was a representative sample. I weighed out exactly a gram.

I poured a couple of teaspoons of water into a little Master Foods spice jar, which earlier in the day had contained oregano. I’d cleaned it and removed the label. I tapped the cocaine into the jar and swilled it around. The water went a little cloudy but it didn’t look too bad.

I filled a frying pan with an inch of water and put it on the stove, scooped out about half a gram of bicarbonate of soda and added that to the mix in the Master Foods jar. If the coke was any good, I wouldn’t need much more bicarb than that.

When the water in the frying pan started to boil, I stood at the stove with the jar and said, “Okay, let’s see how we go.”

I screwed the lid on tight to the little jar and dropped a teaspoon into the frying pan, with the underneath of the spoon facing up. I lowered the jar into the water, resting the bottom of the jar on the mound of the teaspoon, to conduct heat away from the jar and along the teaspoon. The last thing we wanted was an exploding base test.

I swirled the solution and it quickly went clear in the heat. I pulled the jar out and untightened the lid for a second, to release the pressure. Then I lowered the jar back into the frying pan.

For about thirty seconds the solution stayed clear, and then a film of oil began to appear on the surface. The cocaine hydrochloride—a salt that dissolved readily in the blood vessels of the mucous membrane—was now becoming pure cocaine base, or freebase, or candy rock, or crack. The bicarb was reacting with the hydrochloride, and the cocaine was being separated from the other diluents.

As the layer of oil thickened, it became too heavy to support its own weight and began to form an almost perfect sphere. As I shook the jar gently, the oil drop fell to the bottom of the jar, where it bounced and wobbled.

More balls of oil formed, and dangled, and fell to the bottom of the jar, until the main ball grew larger and larger and there was no more oil on the surface.

“Well, it’s definitely coke,” I joked. I knew now the deal would go through. “I think it’s okay too.”

I’m sure Film Boy’s shoulders loosened up a little in relief.

When I was certain I’d extracted all the coke, I turned the stove off, moved over to the kitchen sink, and turned on the cold tap. I flicked some water on the jar to cool down the glass. Then, with the jar tilted sideways, I gradually moved it under the flow of the cold water. As the gray oil began to harden, it turned an off-white color. This was the right color, this or a dirty yellow gray; pink suggested the presence of procaine or Xylocaine or some other inferior substitute.

One second the oil was wobbling around, the next it was beginning to lift off the bottom of the jar as I shook it gently, and the next it was a hard white rock tinkling and pinging as it hit the glass. I held the jar up to the room and smiled.

“Tinkle tinkle! We have lift-off.”

“So is it good?” Film Boy asked.

“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll know exactly how good when I dry it and weigh it.”

The rock was completely solid now. I tipped out the water and dropped the rock into the palm of my hand. I sat down at the table and placed it on a paper towel, bouncing it around to dry it.

When I could hold the rock without getting any moisture on my fingers, I knew it was about as dry as it was going to get. I dropped it onto the diamond scales. It weighed .73 grams.

“There you go,” I said as I fine-tuned the milligram arm. “Your cocaine is seventy-three percent pure. That’s my job done. Apart from beam me up, Scotty.”

Film Boy nodded his head like he was trying to ponder his options.

“Seventy-three, eh? That’s a pretty heavy step-on.”

He was talking through his arse and he was bluffing some slick Greek boys who, while not out-and-out frightening, were tougher than he was. I myself was pretty impressed they’d done this well. I’d seen—and sold—a whole lot worse than seventy-three.

“Listen, seventy-three’s okay,” I said. “I’ve never seen a return better than ninety, ninety-one, and that was rocks. You’re doing okay. Just don’t step on it any more and you’ve got a good product.”

I was a fucking facilitator. I should have been in industrial relations.

“You’ve got a deal,” Film Boy said, and the semi-gangsters grinned, but still in character, and everyone shook hands. Tucker was smiling broadly. No wonder, I thought. Apart from his cash cut from Film Boy, he was probably all set to get a little bag as a prearranged cut from the semi-gangsters. The coke might have been eighty percent pure before that deal was made.

The semi-gangsters counted the money, which took a good while, but was not the kind of thing an outsider could really help with.

I cut the rock into smaller chunks with Film Boy’s blade. Candy and Film Boy and Babe had never based before, so we decided the experienced users would go first and they could watch and learn. I was pleased to be showing off an old and dormant skill.

Being MC, I was first diver off the block.

The pipe I’d bought was ostensibly a pipe for smoking buds. I’d filled the upturned end of the pipe—the end you light—with about twenty circular gauze filters, which I’d cut out painstakingly with nail scissors and pushed down until they were wedged tight.

I placed my little piece of rock on the topmost piece of gauze and clicked on the lighter. It was a model that didn’t need to be held down with the finger to keep the flame going. You could melt your thumb trying to freebase with a Bic disposable. I adjusted the flame until it shot out a good four inches, yellow at the tip, then blue closer in, and invisible just near the nozzle.

I held the blue part of the flame above the rock, close enough to heat but not touch. The surface of the rock began to turn to oil, which oozed down through the filters. When most of the rock was liquid or semiliquid, I took a deep breath and blew out, emptying my lungs as completely as I could.

At the point where I could exhale no more breath, I turned the flame onto the gauze filters, and at the same time put my mouth over the stem of the pipe and began to inhale. The freebase sizzled and the glass pipe filled with a thick curling smoke, which rapidly disappeared down the pipe and down my throat. The extraordinary thing about the sensation of freebasing was that, aside from all the other wacky things it did to your head, the cocaine acted as a local anesthetic on the throat, so you never felt any pain from inhaling so much hot smoke. Unlike, say, pulling hard on a bong full of really harsh pot.

I held the smoke in. For as long as possible. That roar of the blood vessels began, that luxurious and over-the-top pounding of the heart that I hadn’t felt in a couple of years. My head was going boom boom boom. This was buffaloes and death compared to snorting’s aggravating fleas. A goddamn stampede, an intrabody, extrabody, out-of-body experience.

“Ffffffffhew!”

I blew the smoke out and sat stock-still, staring at a spot on the table, hoping my head wouldn’t explode. About thirty seconds later I felt I could begin to talk. “Jesus,” was what I said. Strange, the expressions we use.

It was a good rush, freebasing, just as blasting coke was okay too. But that’s all it was, all rush and no tail, and you wanted it all the time (I mean all the time, every two minutes; I could get by for a good four hours without heroin, eight in an emergency), and it made you feel real juddery and jumpy and, ultimately, just plain nervous. Also, cocaine made dickheads into bigger, louder dickheads.

The pipe did the rounds. Everyone was pretty happy, especially the novices, though Film Boy got his first pipe wrong breathing out when he should have sucked, and blew his melting rock and a few of the gauze filters all over the kitchen. We gave him a second go, of course. A born goose, that one. Someone should have said to him, early in the game, “Film Boy, don’t even think about dealing.”

Candy and I got our thousand bucks and said good-bye to everyone, and it was a good feeling to close the door. We stood in the silence for a moment and hugged, pleased with the ease of the earn. In the middle of hugging I realized that there was this other stuff, that I loved Candy and felt some enormous warmth, for her, for us, for the situation, for the way we were in it together, for better or for worse. Then we rang Lester and organized to meet him. To go get some real drugs. To get rid of these jitters from the coke. To come home and get a big one on board.

I DO

We thought a wedding would fix us. We thought we would go through the motions of normality and then normality would arrive for real.

We knew that we were in it forever. When we banged up a warm hit of smack, our love seemed infinite. All that we knew then was the world of bliss, that clean, polar realm of narcosis where the liquid psyche resides. We were, as they say, as one. We’d found the secret glue that held all things together.

“I love you so fucking much, Candy.” There was no eloquence necessary beyond that delivered by heroin.

“You’re my beautiful boy,” she’d croak back, sometimes running her fingers through my hair.

We’d be lying on the couch in the warehouse, drifting in and out of conversation. In this state, the idea of marriage was a given, an absolute—the culmination of the momentum of deep love and loyalty.

But waking up sick, or waiting for dope, it was hard to feel anything other than awkward. Talk was kept at a frigid minimum. Eye contact was avoided. We chewed our nails and waited for phones to ring, for Lester or Kojak or someone with money. We couldn’t touch each other. We couldn’t help each other. It was like love went on hold.

Then when we hit up the dope at last, we’d fall into each other’s arms, and it was as if the terrible tension had never existed. In this way we were like dogs, who in the bliss of being patted forget completely the stress of being recently hit.

In between these two extremes were the medium times, which was most of the time, the day-to-day stuff, neither sickness nor bliss. Heroin was the oxygen that fueled our bodies through the days. Sometimes the idea of marriage carried over, like a kind of leakage, from the bliss times to the medium times.

We were at Candy’s parents for dinner. It’s fair to assume we were putting on the bullshit fronts about how good our lives were; it’s what we did in such situations. I was always working on some big plan or project. It was pleasant, like a dream, going to Candy’s parents’ place and eating nice food and drinking real wine, expensive wine.

Candy’s father, a gentle man in favor of a quiet life, would often bring the conversation around to the grandchildren he was so looking forward to.

“When’s that half forward coming?” he said. “We’ll have him playing for the Saints.”

Candy and I would look at each other, and what with the red wine and the meal and a little bit of heroin and the real love between us, it was easy to smile and feel real emotions.

“I think soon would be good,” Candy said.

“Me too,” I said. “I really want a baby.”

The four of us seated around the table were engulfed in a mixture of hope and belief—that the arrival of a baby would, must, clean up the mess we were in. The mess was generally unacknowledged and unspoken at gatherings like this, but if you concentrated, you could sense it in the air, like a faint smell.

“I must say one thing, though,” Candy’s father said. “I know it must seem old-fashioned for you younger generation, but I’d like to think that no grandson of mine will be born a bastard.”

I had no intention of ever not being with Candy. Deep in my heart it was inconceivable that we would ever separate. The mess our lives were in: that was the thing that would end.

“We’ve talked about getting married,” I said. “We think it’s a great idea. It’s just a matter of when, really.” It was rare to be able to speak from the heart with Candy’s parents.

“Exactly. It’s just a matter of when,” Candy’s mother said.

“Well, we’ll start planning it,” Candy said, and later in the week we really did begin the process of filling out the necessary forms and applications.

It wasn’t hard to plan. In the end we opted for low-key simplicity: a registry office wedding, a couple of witnesses, a couple of relatives. Anything larger seemed too daunting, and besides, we knew that money spent on any kind of lavish displays would be money not available to us in times of desperation.

“What about inviting your father?” Candy asked. “It might be a good chance to try to get in touch with him.”

“Candy, you know the story: any event in my life is a negative event in my father’s eyes. I don’t think he’d see a wedding as being any different.”

“Things change, you know.”

“I don’t think so. But maybe you’re right. Maybe Lex has got a number where I can reach him.”

“And what about Lex? Let’s invite him. It’d be great to see him again.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll definitely do that. That’s a good idea,” I said.

I did invite Lex, who couldn’t make it, and he did have a number where I could find my father, but in the rush of things, I never got around to making the call. It had been so long. It was too hard.

Candy’s father had a younger sister, Catherine, who lived in Sydney with her eleven-year-old daughter, Candy’s cousin Sarah. I’d met them once or twice back when things were beginning with Candy and me. We’d had leisurely dinners in the late summer dusk in Aunt Catherine’s leafy Stanmore backyard. Sarah idolized Candy, and possibly me too. Candy and I might have been, to Sarah, visitors from another world, where style and grace and freedom were the norm, where every drag of a cigarette glowed with a renegade beauty. We invited Catherine and Sarah and they were thrilled to accept.

We were married one winter Saturday. Obviously it was a big dope weekend. You want to be relaxed at your own wedding. But we were caught short of money, so Candy arranged a brothel shift for Friday night. Aunt Catherine and Sarah arrived at six that evening. They met us outside the warehouse and took us to dinner.

“Are you excited?” Sarah asked.

“Of course!” Candy said. “It’s my big day.”

“Our big day,” I corrected, and everyone laughed.

It was awkward making excuses—“I still have to go to my cleaning job, worse luck,” Candy said—and cutting the dinner a little short. I liked Catherine and Sarah a lot. Catherine probably knew what was going on but chose to operate with a discreet and nonjudgmental compassion. Sarah’s innocence and enthusiasm were charming, and under the circumstances, painful to watch. We walked them to their hotel and told them we’d pick them up in a taxi in the morning. Then Candy caught a cab to work and I wandered home and watched the Friday night movie, Alien.

Candy came home in the early hours with enough dope for a big morning hit and plenty of money for later. We set the alarm and grabbed a few hours’ sleep, allowing ourselves an hour to get ready. I felt a bit fuzzy but it wasn’t too hard to get out of bed on such a momentous day. I sat in my underpants, hunched over the coffee table as I squirted the water into the spoon. Some kind of speech welled up in me, a rare event but a sincere one.

“I don’t know about you, Candy,” I said, “but I’m doing this today, above all else, because I love you. Today really is special.” I pulled out the plunger from the barrel—it made a tiny, lovely pop—and languidly stirred the water to dissolve the heroin. “Today we’re making it formal. I want to be with you forever. I don’t want to use dope forever.”

Candy was naked, exquisitely beautiful. She walked across the room and straddled my lap, facing me. She stroked my temples and cheeks and kissed me once, a dry sweet kiss, on the forehead. “Forever and ever,” she said. “We’ll be together forever.”

She wrapped her arms around my neck and squeezed me to her chest. I sat there with my ear pressed against her skin, at the boundary between the world outside and the inside world of Candy. After a moment I pulled back. I grazed my fingers back and forth across her left breast, until her perfect pink nipple began to rise. My hand was swaying like seaweed in a rock pool washed by a gentle change of tide. Then I leaned forward and cupped her breast in my hand and wet the nipple with my lips. It was a fairy-tale kiss.

“Come on,” I said, “let’s have this dope. We don’t want to be late.”

We whacked up and then made some coffee and Candy had a shower while I lathered and shaved. I was well stoned, so the long slow rasp of the blade on my skin was at that moment the noise of all pleasure condensed.

I showered and dried and gelled my hair back and dressed in the tuxedo I’d rented. I felt wonderful.

“The ring,” Candy said, “have you got the ring?”

I felt for it in my pocket. “No worries,” I said, “the ring is safe.”

It was a plain rose gold band we’d bought for eighty dollars in a hockshop during the week and which, a few days after the wedding, regretfully, we would end up hocking for twenty dollars.

Candy had found a magnificent Spanish lace dress in a secondhand clothes shop. It was old and some of the white had yellowed, so she’d dyed it black. By chance, in another shop, she’d found a pair of elbow-length black lace gloves. Her long blond hair hung wildly, and bright red lipstick defined her pale face. She stood in the middle of the room and twirled around.

“How do I look?”

She took my breath away, a kind of Gothic flamenco baby doll.

“Amazingly beautiful,” I marveled. “I wish we owned a camera.”

She smiled. “Tonight, you will be my husband.”

I nodded my head a few times, savoring the wonderful thought. “And I guess that means you’ll be my wife.”

When we pulled up in the taxi to collect Aunt Catherine and Sarah from their hotel, Sarah’s eyes nearly popped out of her head.

“Your dress is black!” she said, climbing into the back seat beside Candy, and Candy smiled and said, “I know.” Sarah grinned in astonished delight.

“It’s different,” Aunt Catherine said, deadpan. “But you do look beautiful.”

The registry office was in the Old Mint building, a musty colonial relic with an air of decaying grandeur, incongruously nestled amid the skyscrapers of the business district. Anne and Len were our witnesses, or bridesmaid and best man, if you could call them that in such a reduced ceremony. They were waiting out front with Candy’s parents when our taxi pulled up.

I saw Candy’s mother’s jaw drop as her daughter emerged from the taxi in her black Spanish dress. Her face seemed to ripple for an instant as the battle between the need to be angry and the need for composure took place.

“It had to be something, didn’t it?” she muttered to Candy as we all gathered around and made pleasantries.

Candy’s father kissed her and said, “You look like a princess, darling.”

“The wicked princess, yes,” Candy’s mother said, but she smiled and shook her head, as if accepting defeat, and we all went inside in a fairly good mood.

It was all very nonbaroque, the civil ceremony. There was a little spiel from the celebrant guy, the “in sickness and in health” stuff, and then the “Do you take this woman, do you take this man?”

“I do,” I said.

“I do,” Candy said.

I slipped the ring on her finger. I made a little prayer to the powers that be: Make this real. Make it a moment of change. Then we kissed and there were flashbulbs flashing. We signed our names a couple of times and Anne and Len did some signing too. We went outside into the overcast day and everyone took a few more photos and we smiled lamely and Candy’s mother said, “Well, back to our place for some drinks and a bite to eat.” It all seemed a strange letdown. I really just wanted to be alone with Candy.

But we went back for the tiny gathering. It was a little stifling, with classical music turned way down low in the background and the eight of us milling around sipping champagne or lemonade and nibbling at cheese on crackers. After a while I found that trying to make small talk was becoming difficult. I was the safekeeper of the dope and I had our syringes and a spoon down my socks. I figured it was time for a visit to the toilet.

I was trying to find a vein and had been in there for a few minutes when Candy came to the door.

“What are you doing in there?”

It wasn’t that I was trying to hide it, it’s just that I wanted to be alone for a minute. It wasn’t as if we both could have disappeared into the bathroom. But I could hear from her tone of voice that she didn’t like the idea of me being in there alone, making biased decisions about how to divide up the dope.

“I’m doing a shit.”

“You fucking liar,” she hissed, trying to keep her voice down. “Open the door!”

“Candy, go away.” It was hard trying to talk with my belt looped around my arm and held between my teeth.

“Open the fucking door!”

I could see the handle jiggling, the strain she was putting on the lock.

“I’ll be out in a minute,” I said, trying to sound pleasant.

Bingo! I got the spurt of blood into the syringe and pushed the plunger in. Candy was whispering, “If you don’t get out right now,” but it really didn’t matter. I cleaned the syringe and flushed the toilet for effect, out of habit.

“There you go,” I said, opening the door and smiling widely. I handed her the packet of dope and the spoon and a syringe. “There you go, wife. Have a nice blast.”

“You prick, husband.” She laughed and took the stuff off me and went into the bathroom and closed the door.

I went back out to the lounge room to be social. The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the couch, hopefully only a couple of minutes later, and Candy was shaking me awake.

“You must have fallen asleep,” she was saying, trying to gloss it over. “A little too much champagne, I think.”

“I’m so sorry,” I exclaimed, jumping up, straightening my suit. “It’s all the lead-up to the wedding. I haven’t had much sleep.”

The others halfheartedly entered the convenient fiction, mumbling, “Of course,” and, “Yes, I’m sure it must be nerve-racking,” but it was really time for us to make our excuses and good-byes before things got any worse.

“Thank you for everything,” we said to everyone.

We weren’t going on a honeymoon, and a wedding is a seminal event, so we figured we’d go get lots more dope, lash out more than usual. We’d talked Candy’s parents into giving us cash for a present—“We’re right for everything else,” we’d said—and Aunt Catherine had slipped us an envelope at the last minute too. There was also Candy’s money from the night before. We made the taxi driver stop while I got out and phoned Lester from a booth. Lester said come over, and we directed the taxi across the Westgate Bridge.

“You were fully nodded off back there, you idiot,” Candy said.

I cringed at the thought of it. “Shit. That’s a bad look. I remember sitting down and talking to Aunt Catherine. I must have just closed my eyes for a moment. Do you think they would have noticed?”

“Oh, of course not. They were only all standing there gawking at you like they’d just seen a snow leopard. Of course they didn’t notice, darling.”

I bit my bottom lip and shook my head slowly and looked out the window, almost groaning in embarrassment. Then I caught Candy’s eye and we both burst out laughing.

We made the taxi wait across the street from Lester’s place. Lester thought it was hilarious, us turning up in our wedding gear like that, and he gave us an extra hundred on top of what we bought.

“I like to see old-fashioned commitment,” he said. “Good on you both.”

We were hungry now. The taxi took us back across the bridge and we got off at a McDonald’s in the center of town, not too far from the warehouse. We attracted a few curious stares, and I guess maybe it was a bit strange being dressed like that at McDonald’s. We didn’t give a fuck.

I had a Quarter Pounder with cheese, a chocolate shake, medium fries, and an apple pie. I liked taking the lid off the shake and dipping the fries in. You got the salt and sugar tastes at the same time. Candy had a cheeseburger, a strawberry shake, and a large fries.

We sat in the smoking section. Normally we bought Horizons since they were the cheapest, but today was our wedding and we’d splurged on Stuyvesants, the international passport.

We were the coolest people in McDonald’s.

We had a lot going for us. We’d found the secret glue that held all things together. We were young and beautiful. We were married now. We were about to go home, get out of our monkey suits, get naked, and get wasted.

WALLET

“Eh, Nick, how you going?”

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 665