THE COST OF SUGAR

Although based-on-fact, parts of this narrative have been fictionalised: for reasons of continuity, several marsupials may have been combined into one; the author has at no time actually worn razorpants (Note: the author asserts his rights as originator of the word “razorpants”. Any unauthorised use breaches intellectual property laws).

Four-thirty a.m., day four of detox; you discover you’ve run out of not only cigarettes, but also sugar. It is now you realise that you are truly alone. It’s intolerable. You’re sure you remember something about this in the UN Charter of Human Rights: No person shall be deprived of a cigarette and sweetened coffee on his or her balcony – especially if he or she is withdrawing from methadone.

            There follows a mad ransacking of cupboards and drawers, searching for the magpied remnants of a hundred hotel stays. Triumph sinks in despair when what you thought was a sachet of honey turns out to be salad-dressing. For a moment you wonder how vinaigrette would go with coffee, but abandon the idea. There are those stock-cubes, though ... no, it’s hopeless; you’re just going to have to go out and get some.

            That Vegemite toast you forced yourself to eat might have been a mistake. This occurs to you while you’re exercising in an effort to spike your endorphin levels. Sometime after the thirtieth sit-up you find you can’t sit-back-down again. You hear a noise like a goose being throttled, and take a few seconds to realise that it’s coming from you – this is because you’re distracted by the fact that your legs have seized-up too.

After an awkward minute resembling something from an advanced yoga manual – or a pretzel recipe – you collapse back on to the rug, catch your breath and steel yourself for your coming shower. You still have some self-respect – some – and before you leave the house you want to wash away as much as you can of the stink of your condition: that broiling meat smell of detox sweat, and the other little pleasantnesses that accompany the male version of opioid withdrawal.

You feel a little better after a shower, the way one might after resting a while on a bed of hot nails. Then your deodorant collides with the histamines storming your body: now you’re going to sneeze – a lot. If anyone has ever actually died after sneezing their brains out, they were probably a recovering junkie.

Pulling-on your two baggiest jumpers and your largest pair of jeans, you’re surprised to find they feel not nearly as bad as you’d anticipated. You’d expected to feel like there were razors sewn into the seams, but instead it’s only like you’re wearing sacks made of echidna quills. Things are looking up.

So, this is what your life has come to. It’s five-thirty on a winter morning, and you’re walking to Campsie – on purpose (That little tobacconist next to the station opens early and you resent paying service-station prices for cigarettes). The night and fog aren’t a worry, though; thankfully the shower has turned your ears into heat-lamps to guide your way. You’re Rudolph the Red-Eared fucking Junkie.

You decide withdrawal-psychosis is kicking in when a possum, attracted by the light of your ears, emerges from behind a bus-shelter. It’s not so much the possum that makes you think so as the fact that it starts talking to you. It may well have something important to say but you’ll never know; you’re too busy trying to ascertain its species to listen to it – if it’s a honey-glider, it might have a stash of sweetener nearby; and, having discovered its stash, you’ll also have discovered its young, which you can hold hostage until it returns with your smokes.

The possum apparently gets your drift, because it darts over the churchyard fence and into the darkness. The odyssey continues.

Having successfully acquired cigarettes, you stop to think about the sugar. Woolworths will be open at seven, but the sun will be up by then. You have to get back indoors before you start melting; nothing for it but to swallow your disgust and pay four times as much at the Seven-Eleven.

Twenty minutes and three cigarettes later you’re back in your kitchen, making coffee with the kind of fervour you once reserved – in similar circumstances – for heroin. It’s going to be so good. You pry the lid off the coffee tin with your teeth while ripping open the sugar bag with shaky hands; you’ll sort out the jar later, no time now. As the jug comes to the boil you bound across to the fridge, fling open the door, and realise you forgot about the milk. Weeping silently, you try to imagine going back outside. Unless ...

Is it possible to milk a possum?

JAMES GANDOLFINI, GANGSTER FILMS AND GETTING IT

James Gandolfini is dead. Those extraordinarily beautiful, savage, expressive eyes are closed. Gandolfini became famous playing a series of, to say the least, morally ambiguous characters in films and on stage. As much as his physical appearance, it was probably his ability to show the human side of these figures that landed him the lead role in The Sopranos.

            When it ended, after seven seasons, there was a lot of bitching about The Sopranos’ final scene. Me, I liked it. It provided the only realistic coda to the story of this monster we’d come to love.

            Tony Soprano is sitting in a New Jersey diner. He’s arrived ahead of his family, and kills time by picking a song on the juke-box and ordering some onion rings. Having just come out on top in a brutal mob-war, Tony feels relaxed; comfortable; safe.

            The story-arc that’s brought us here has seen nearly everyone close to him killed. His shrink, after years of soul-searching, has finally figured out Tony’s a psychopath – therefore, worse than incurable – and cut him loose. As his wife and brat kids begin arriving, the camera hits a note of dissonance. We see a guy emerging from the men’s room; another sitting at the bar – is he just taking in the surroundings, or was there something in that look? Is Tony paranoid? Are we?

            Many viewers felt cheated that we didn’t get to see that bullet pumped into Tony Soprano’s head. They miss the point the filmmakers are trying to get across: this is it for Tony; whether now or later, it’s coming. If he doesn’t die of lung-cancer in a prison infirmary, chances are that, sometime, his kids will have to see his brains blown out all over his onion rings. He can never relax. Tony’s life is not glamorous; not something to aspire to; at best, it’s a treadmill of tedium – at worst, a nightmare for him and anyone unfortunate enough to be near him.

            As Channel Nine prepares to launch yet another season of Underbelly, rhapsodising yet another thug/pimp/murderer, it’s worth taking a moment to think about how we react to gangster films. Most of us just don’t get it. To quote my friend Parkstreet, Underbelly: the Golden Mile turned Kings Cross into Disneyland for wannabe gangsters. We see, in these films and TV series, people with money and power; people who are respected or feared; people to whom the normal rules don’t seem to apply. We glamorise them and miss the ugliness at the heart of their stories.

            Mention Scarface and someone will almost certainly come out with, “Say hello to my little friend!” The abiding image is of a guy with a machine-gun-mounted grenade-launcher, taking on all comers after snorting a mountain of coke. Most forget that he ends up dead in his fountain, riddled with bullets, after murdering his best friend and seeing his sister shot before his eyes.

            Even Michal Corleone in the Godfather films – a man who genuinely wants to be good – for all his power and wealth, dies alone and tormented. His family has been destroyed, his daughter killed in front of him by someone trying to kill him. He feels like he’s sold his soul for some beans.

            When asked why he made the endings of Godfather Two and Three so dark, Francis Ford Coppola said it was because the audience somehow missed the point he was making in the first film: that what these people are doing is bad.

            And that was James Gandolfini’s triumph: to create a character so human, so commonplace – and at the same time so truly appalling – that we have to relate to him. If we pay attention we can see ourselves in him, and know that he is nothing we want to be.

            Some actors last for decades, recreating themselves time and again. Others, it seems, are born for a single role which burns itself indelibly into the collective consciousness. James Gandolfini was the latter. I’m glad he was with us a while.

STEP

This is gonna hurt.

            You feel that? The hollowness, spreading from beneath your stomach, like cool air coursing between your muscles and bones; that delicious, bitter-sweet tide climbing the back of your throat, building to explode in your brain; nerve-endings firing from follicles to sweaty fingertips. That’s the fear.

            No, don’t try to choke it down. Don’t try to ignore it. Taste it. Savour it. Close your eyes and let it wash, over and through you. Feed on it. Take a few deep breaths and grow, yourself, around it. Feel it make you bigger. Open your eyes.

            Take the step.

BODY IMAGE - Get Real

The Government runs something called The Positive Body Image Awards – fairly self-explanatory. All you have to do to be nominated is hire one plus-size model for one promotion during the year (Or, for fashion houses or department stores, carry plus-sized clothing).

            It’s been moderately successful. Some high-end designers and major clothing chains have been nominated. Even the women’s magazines are coming on-board – led, admittedly, by the staid old Women’s Weekly. And the only hold-out? (Sharp intake of breath): The advertising industry. Is any more proof needed that advertising is evil?

            I’m being facetious. Advertising is only the devil on our shoulder, whispering in our ear. No salesman can trick us into paying for something we don’t want. No commercial can sell us something we don’t desire. They can, however, lie about just what it is we’re buying. And what, in the end, do we always believe we’ll get when we swipe that plastic? Why, happiness of course. The bill comes later.

            The advertising executives know us. They spend a lot of time and money studying our ways. If they’re selling us the body image lie it’s because they know we think we’ll be happy buying it.

            Body dysmorphia: the scientific name for when you can’t relate the figure in the mirror to the one you see in your head. It’s why anorexics and bulimics keep wasting when they’re already skeletal; they genuinely see themselves as fat. It works the other way too. Since the advent in the media of positive body image campaigns, people who, for health reasons, could afford to lose a few kilos now delude themselves they’re “curvy” or “husky”. There’s a big difference between “curvy” and obese.

            It’s unclear whether dysmorphia leads to anxiety and depression or vice-versa. It’s a complex issue, and it wasn’t invented by the advertising industry ­– they just nurture it for financial gain.

            This inability to see reality isn’t limited to weight. I know a beautiful woman. No, I mean true, spectacular, exotic beauty; the kind that turns heads everywhere she goes – to the extent that it sometimes makes her paranoid. For as long as I’ve known her this lady has expressed insecurity about the size of her breasts, and a desire to have them augmented.

            Now, there’s nothing wrong with her breasts; they’re perfect. I know, I’ve seen them. In fact, recently someone asked me why he hadn’t seen us together in a while and, unable to remember her name, described her as “the stacked one”. I could tell her this story, but it wouldn’t stop her racing-off to have dangerous, unnecessary surgery. No amount of objective reality can alter the insane ideal she carries in her head.

            More and more, men also are affected by this stuff. You can’t buy a carton of milk anymore without seeing some pituitary-freak grinning at you over a headline proclaiming that, in six weeks, you too can look like a stocking full of footballs.

            My sister’s boyfriend has a teenage son. He spends all his free time at the gym, hanging out with the type of goon who introduced the phrase, “You ‘mirin’, brah?” to the language. The boy is huge. Not long ago he was rushed to hospital in the middle of the night, screaming and clutching his abdomen; his growing body couldn’t support the strain he was putting on it. Soon after being released he was back in the gym.

            If we keep buying it, they’ll keep selling it. We need to get real. Once we do that, the media will respond. To keep making money, they’ll have to. Have a look in the mirror – or, better yet, get some objective evidence; a tape-measure, some scales and a BMI chart. If what you find is unhealthily skinny, stop exercising for a while and eat some more; if you’re too big, admit it to yourself and do something about it. But get real.

            More than that, accept yourself – your true, best self. Don’t buy into a fantastic ideal. Fake tits or the world’s biggest pecs won’t make you happy, but they may just do you lasting damage. Even if they don’t, you’ll soon be looking for something else to fill that hole.

            Me, when I train – the little I can these days if I don’t wish to vanish completely from sight – I don’t think of becoming Arnold Schwarzenegger. I think in terms of proportion, efficiency and functionality. By proportion, I mean in a human sense; a Greco-Roman statue, not something out of a video-game or graphic novel; a healthy body functioning efficiently within its own limitations. The kind of physique you used to see on fighters before fighters had to look like underwear models, and underwear models had to look like body-builders.

            Nature seems to have decreed – for the moment, at least – that I can have either a six-pack or an ass, but not both. That being the case, in the interest of health and getting real, I can live with the four-pack above the quarter-inch of belly-fat. No, really, I can ...

A LABOR LEGEND

“The allied powers having proclaimed that the Emperor Napoléon is the sole obstacle to the restoration of peace in Europe, the Emperor Napoléon (...) declares that he renounces (...) the thrones of France and Italy, and that there is no sacrifice (...) that he is not prepared to make in the interest of France.”

 – Napoléon Bonaparte, 1814

Listen – you can almost hear them, can’t you? Chisels on stone, tap, tap, tap. They’re busy already carving the Prime Minister’s monument.

Julia Gillard, they’ll say, is a Labor legend: first female PM; bold and feisty; a brave reformer, accomplished and visionary legislator and champion of women’s rights. Gutsy to the last, she went down swinging against a vast misogynist conspiracy from the opposition and media, and egomaniacal treachery from her own ranks. Give her a statue next to Paul, Hawkie and Gough.

            It’s a compelling story; romantic, even. Its only flaw lies in the fact that it’s utter nonsense – really, the worst kind of steaming bullshit. Feisty she may well be, but if Julia Gillard really was a Labor legend she wouldn’t be three months from leading the government to annihilation.

            You see, Labor legends not only have guts – Ms Gillard certainly meets that requirement – but also principles. They are often ruthless – again, the PM has that base covered – but always in pursuit of an ideal, not simply to grab or hold on to power. And power is sought in order to carry out a vision for the nation, not for its own sake. A Labor legend, a true Labor legend, is willing to take a position based, not on political expediency or populism but, on true belief – and is prepared to live or die for it at the ballot-box.

            Julia Gillard marched into Parliament House one dark night and deposed a sitting Prime Minister. She did it by factional deals and bullying, and simply because she could. It’s not clear to the electorate that she’s given a moment’s thought in the three years since to anything besides staying in power. She certainly hasn’t articulated anything resembling a vision for the nation.

            Still, the public might have forgiven her for that – if it wasn’t for the “brave legislator” bit. You don’t get to claim bold reformer status for policies forced upon you in a deal to retain government; not after going to an election promising you’d never implement them; and especially not if your first move against your predecessor was pressuring him to dump those same policies.

            In politics, once you’re perceived to be a liar or a hypocrite you’re finished. The PM’s reputation has never recovered. Even the “Misogyny Speech”, a great and timely oration, didn’t do the trick. People couldn’t help but notice that, the very same day, the “women’s champion” arbitrarily shifted eighty-seven thousand single-mothers onto the dole – cutting their incomes by around a third. They also noticed when she preferred a  male factional ally over an able woman for the Batman pre-selection.

            There’s no doubt Ms Gillard has faced a fair degree of sexism. She’s been the subject of some truly awful chatter a man would never have to wear. But the misogyny point had only to be made the once; by repeatedly trying to make the election about gender rather than policy, she plays into some of the worst misogynist stereotypes. She begins to seem desperate. She also allows Tony Abbot to look prime-ministerial in response.

            Like it or not, our Westminster parliamentary system has mutated into a quasi-presidential one. A government that has, on balance, a reasonably good record in difficult times will fall because Ms Gillard leads it. When he made the pronouncement quoted above, Napoléon had a couple of hundred-thousand men in the field – thirty thousand of them outside his window – and a fair chance of fighting at least to a draw. For Labor the choice is between a loss and a wipe-out.

            He has become a byword for selfish ambition yet, when the choice was between his own interests and those of his country, Napoléon abdicated – twice. If she believes an Abbot Coalition Government will be as bad for the nation as she says, Julia Gillard should do the same. She’ll still get the pension, the office and driver and all the perks of a retired Prime Minister; the Tories won’t win an enormous majority and spend the next three years selling-off the country without a fight; and a great party won’t suffer its worst ever defeat.

            The Emperor had more to lose.

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SYDNEY TEEN'S SYNTHETIC-HALLUCINOGEN RELATED DEATH

 “The reality is you don’t know what you’re putting in your mouth”, says St Vincent’s Hospital’s celebrity Emergency Department Director, Prof Gordian Fulde. It makes as much sense as anything else that’s been said in the cacophonous blathering over a Sydney teen’s tragic, synthetic hallucinogen-related death.

            The inherent absurdity of the prohibitionist approach is encapsulated in today’s standard media line: “Calls to ban synthetic drugs as a teenager falls to his death after taking what he thought was LSD”. According to this logic, Henry Kwan would’ve been better off if only he’d gotten the real stuff.

            So, brothers and sisters, strap yourselves-in for another round of hysteria; of ill thought-out pronouncements and tabloid terror. Prepare to see the grief of another bereaved parent exploited to further a pointless, destructive moral crusade.

            Forgotten amid the breast-beating will be the fact that, if billions of dollars and thousands of lives hadn’t been wasted in a forty-year War on Drugs, these synthetic substitutes ­ – far from being enticing – wouldn’t even exist.

            One of the voices always heard when this discussion heats up is the father of Anna Wood. Twenty-odd years ago now, Anna’s death was the spark for an anti-ecstasy campaign that caused current-affairs viewers everywhere to wet themselves in well-meaning horror. I feel sorry for Mr Wood’s loss, but his contribution to public debate on drugs policy has been a fount of emotive misinformation; he has helped perpetuate the kind of suffering his own family endured.

            You see, Anna died after taking not ecstasy, but a horse tranquiliser she purchased thinking it was ecstasy. Sound familiar? Henry Kwan “believed he could fly” after taking something he wrongly believed was LSD. The point isn’t that drugs are good, but that drug-dealers are innovative mercenaries – and that prohibition only creates new markets and more suffering. If an unscrupulous factory-owner tried to profit by selling jars of shit labelled “Peanut-Butter”, there would be no call to ban peanut-butter. But hey, at least the public gets to feel morally superior about fighting the good fight.

            Meanwhile, a new study out of Canada shows that, not only do registered heroin trials save lives, but they also cost the public purse much less than the alternatives; and a higher proportion of participants take advantage of rehab services than those in methadone or twelve-step programs – more people get clean; fewer people die.

            That’s worth thinking about, surely? No, you’re right; probably not. Better to keep tilting at windmills ...

IN MEMORIAM

You were always there; my first contact each morning, and my last every night. You never let me down, no matter the hour. In the coldest nights of winter you never failed to warm me.

            I knew you were declining. Still, you hung on long after your body was worn-out, because your going would cause me distress. Even as your joints atrophied, you continued to answer my demands.

            Now, you’re gone. Your fractured ass could no longer bear the heat, and I have to learn to make it without you – my coffee, that is.

            I’ll miss you. I love you, Old Black Kettle.

REAL MEN III - Living in the City Makes You Soft

“Living in the city makes you soft”, Daniel Auteuil’s old school friend tells him in the French film, Conversations with My Gardener. I hear that a lot – most recently from my dad and an old friend down from the bush. It’s funny but it nearly always accompanies the phrase, “Living in the city will kill you”; seems mildly contradictory to me.

            Now, let’s see. After twenty years living in the city I can still walk for more than twenty minutes without complaining. Only two country friends, and none of my country cousins, can say the same.

            On the subject of perambulation, when walking up the street my soft city stomach isn’t turned by the sight of two men holding hands – or, god forbid, kissing. I can also behold a group of Asians or Arabs and not suffer a paroxysm of fear and rage because our country’s fucked. Being served by a woman in a bank, post-office or railway station causes me no anxiety about the future of mankind.

            But that’s all negative. What else? In the city I was homeless for a couple of years before I really noticed – Soft city winters are cold when you’ve got just one thin blanket and the clothes on your back. Living in the city I’ve been clinically dead twice. More than twice in the city I’ve had to batter somebody unconscious to preserve safety, liberty ... or virtue. And this is just the stuff I’m willing to talk about.

            None of this is boasting. I know plenty of guys – and more than one woman – who’ve spent their whole lives in the city compared to whom I’m Tinkerbelle.

            City life is so soft and easy that no country pals or kin are ever here more than a week before they start bitching about wanting to escape it.

            I’ve lived in both city and the bush. Each has its attractions and drawbacks. I’ve met hard bastards and soft-cocks in both places. And I’ve never fallen for the age-old myth that, in a country where the bulk of the population has always been urban, somehow the bush is the real Australia.

            So, I break out in a rash if I use the wrong shaving soap. So, when I’m done I use an after-shave moisturiser instead of slapping raw alcohol into my face till it looks like an old saddle. So, I avoid the sun if at all possible. I’ll still nail my soft-spoken city balls to the table next to any blowhard’s – country or city.

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