SLINGS AND ARROWS

                                “ ... In the mind to suffer

                                the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

                                or to take arms against a sea of troubles ...?”

Sleeping better lately. Or more at least. Sure, there are the nightmares but, to meet them, you have to actually sleep. It’s almost a nice change; like going home after a long absence.

            Big decisions ahead: stay the course, or take drastic action? Is what you’re doing working? And if so, is it working fast enough? Is your impatience justified, or will you make things worse trying to make them better?

            I never wanted to be on methadone. I’ve been on it quite a while. At the beginning you rationalise it, saying, “If I have to take it every day for the rest of my life, it’s better than the alternative”. Thirteen years later, the rest of your life seems like a long time. The alternative might have killed you by now, but are you really alive anyway (Possibly. It certainly feels that way when the bad dreams start)?

            So, to rehab or not to rehab – that is the question. I’ve never liked the idea. To me, rehab facilities and all their twelve-step nonsense have always seemed a little cultish. Not sure I’m willing to admit powerlessness in the face of an incurable disease yet, or surrender my authority to a higher power.

            That’s not to say I’m on the willpower bandwagon. As a junkie you get to hear a lot about willpower. If only you had some, you’re told, you could kick this thing tomorrow; now; yesterday. Put simply, that’s bollocks. Nobody who’s ever seen what a junkie will go through to get their gear could ever conclude that they lack, of all things, willpower.

            It may, though, be a matter of power reclaimed. Contrary to the twelve-step dogma, Heroin is not stronger than you. I’ve always inclined to the view that the only power it has over you – beyond the purely physical – is the power you surrender to it. Take that back and it becomes a jackal moping about the dark edges of your life, beyond the fire at the centre. Sure, you wouldn’t turn your back on it but, as long as you stay close to the light, it won’t come too near; especially if you clear out any dead stuff stinking the place up.

            Methadone, much as I dislike it, has been useful. It gives you time to sift through the shit in your head; to figure out how you got here in the first place; and to start doing something about it. However, its usefulness is just about exhausted. The thing about high-functioning autism is you seek comfort, control and safety in routine. A trip to the Methadone clinic three days a week shouldn’t be anybody’s routine – not indefinitely.

            I’ve just about reduced my dose to nothing. I feel like a human again. A screwed-up human, sure, but awake and aware. I’ve seen a lot of people blow it by getting impatient over those last few mils. I think I’ll suffer the slings and arrows a little longer. Tis nobler in the mind, after all.

            Check back with me in November.

ANNIVERSARY

Crisp May morning chills the ears and lips. Sun shines bright without heat. Winter is close.

A normal day.

            Bus turns the corner like it always does. Puff frantically to stockpile nicotine then climb aboard. The usual boring ride to another pointless school day; probably be gone by third period.

            A sly smoke in the vacant lot opposite the school, then up the stairs to start the routine. First bell: roll-call. Compulsory reading (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – far too cool to be a school book). Second bell: trudge along to music – double practical, could be fun; might stick around. Late-bell ... odd; it’s usually me who’s late, not the teacher.

            Nigel’s out of uniform. Funny guy; been expelled from every school in town – a legend he doesn’t discourage says last time was for jumping out a second-storey window; crazy (Had this routine where he stuck needles in his biceps then flexed the muscles to pop them out. Always carving or burning something into his arms. Smoked some grass with him over the holidays then jumped the fence at the Show. Watched him on this ride looked like a giant Mexican hat – the Gravitron, I think. Passengers caged inside the rim, the sombrero starts to spin, tilting steadily on to its edge. Look up when it’s at its zenith – there’s Nigel, wrong way in his cage, trying to climb over the side. Crazy).

            “Mr Pittorino won’t be in today”, barks Sheila the Hun, our Deputy Principal. “I have a class downstairs, so I’ll be keeping an ear out. Behave yourselves.” She turns on her stiletto heel and leaves, sparks ringing each step down the stairs. Things are looking up: two whole periods to play guitar.

            Alone in the storeroom, lost in distortion and pure volume. “Shit, Sam, you scared me. How long have you been there?” She’s trembling, wide-eyed. “What’s up?”

            “It’s Nigel. He’s got a gun in his bag and he says he’s going to kill himself.”

            “Yeah, sure,” Nigel’s always saying that.

            “It’s true, he showed me.”

            “What kind of gun is it?”

            “A sawn-off shotgun,” she chokes through tears. “He’s got a whole belt full of shells. Daniel, what are we going to do?”

            Fucking hysterical girls; can’t she see he’s just looking for attention? He knows she’s still in love with him. “Go tell him to bring it in here and I’ll do it for him. Fucking idiot”.

            Dismiss her with a chord. Interrupt my creative process with this shit – Jesus.

            Back to work; practise, practise, practise. Getting pretty good too, though I say it myself. Just getting back into a rhythm when, dammit, what do they want now? This time she’s got Fiona with her – Fiona’s in love with Nigel too.

            “Jason’s gone to tell the Principal about the gun. Nigel asked if he can hide it in your bag”.

            “Why don’t you hide it in your bag, Sam?”

            “I might get caught.”

            “And you’d rather I did? Get fucked. It’s his mess; let him clean it up”. The girls skitter out. Now, where was I?

            You lose all sense of time and space when you play an electric guitar loud. Swept along on power-chords and squealing harmonics, you don’t notice the door banging open till Sam run/bounce/stumble/screams through it and trips over a chair. “He shot himself! Fuck! Nigel just shot himself!”

            The guitar hits the floor thud/whine. Through the door running. Spin off collisions on the way to the music room.

            Freeze-frame: black and white infused scarlet; rusty tang of fresh blood leads stench of voided bowels. Fiona, on her knees, cradles Nigel’s head – what’s left of it. With no crown to dam it, a waterfall of blood becomes a steaming red-black lake. Rush of people in and out – mostly out. Screaming girls soundtrack a horror movie. Back away from the doorway; half-turn. Sam!

Start running – strait into Sheila the Hun. “Go into the other music room and wait”. She’s crying. No sparks leave the stilettos when she marches into the death room.

            Otherroomandwaitotherroomandwaitotherroomand ... Right. Okay. Good. Do that: go into the other room and wait; go into a psyche-ward five minutes before medication time. Wails; moans; weeping; howls; sound of someone hyperventilating; zombies walk small circles; a girl chews her hand up to the knuckles; another sucks down doses of Ventolin between sobs, eyes wild and streaming. Can’t believe he did it. Can’t take this; will go insane in here. Back outside.

            Numb surreality. Sun still bright, no heat. “Fuck”, says Gaby, who stood behind Nigel when the world went up. “Blood was pissin’ out the back of his head”.

            “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” Fiona launches, claws-first and screaming, at his throat. Rush to pull her away. She collapses, quivering – “I held him in my arms ... I held him in my arms”.

            Peripheral blue: two police walk past and into the now empty classroom. “Jesus,” echoes through the door. “He did a good job of it”.

            He sure did.

A TATTOOED HEART

In 1990 I tattooed my girlfriend’s initial on my right ankle. Did it myself with a needle bound in ink-soaked cotton thread.

I know – stupid, right? But when you’re fourteen years-old, and some deeply screwed-up girl fucks your mind at the same time as the rest of you, the tendency is to believe it will last forever. Thankfully, being fourteen and an idiot, I used India Ink; that initial – and my other two tatts – finally faded to nothing. It only took twenty years.

            Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t regret the tattoos themselves; it’s just that they were ugly and amateurish – they looked like prison tatts. I learned a valuable lesson: Think first.

            Over the next few years, whenever I had the money and the urge to get inked overcame me, all I had to do was spend a few minutes looking at that initial. That and the memory of the bathing beauty on my grandfather’s forearm, getting older and saggier as he did, were enough to persuade me to wait.

            “Wait” is the operative word. Teenagers are morons. So are most twenty-somethings. Had I done it in my twenties I’d have ended up with a winged guitar, the standard skulls and daggers or something equally naff. God forbid, today I could be looking at a dragon every time I remove my shirt.

            You see some beautiful body-art. Very little of it, though, comes from the tattooist’s wall. The best stuff tells a story; tells you something about the person underneath it. The best stuff is original. Over the years I’ve designed one or two pieces for friends. Because I knew them, I was able to come up with art that expressed their personalities better than number thirty-seven from the album could.  And there’s little chance they’ll ever bump into someone with the same tattoo.

            There’s an adage that says, Never tattoo anybody’s name on your body (unless, of course, it’s “Mother” or “Jesus”). Indeed, tattooists do a roaring trade in disguising such errors of judgement. Not sure I entirely agree. It’s that body-art as life-story thing again. And, having decided to mark yourself with someone else’s name, cover-up or removal is a cop-out.

Trying to erase a name or initial, or cover it over, is like trying to erase a person from your life – it doesn’t work. Your mind still knows they were there; you’ll still have the scar to remind you; and covering it up usually just makes a bigger mess. Even if it doesn’t, each look at the replacement will remind you of why it’s there; of what’s underneath.

It’s only fitting that my ex-girlfriend’s initial took twenty years to fade. In the two years I associated with them she and her family did twenty years-worth of damage. During those twenty years I lived a life worth remembering. My next tattoos will encapsulate some of it. They’ve had time to grow in my mind, and are already a part of me; I see them already. A deep part of myself will be visible on the outside – which is how it should be.

One of the old ones was a heart on my forearm. I could cover it up or show it, depending on my mood. It was mine. Now, it’s dissolved into my body. Only a faint scar betrays where it once was. There’s probably something in that.

PREJUDICE, HYPOCRISY

They’re funny things, prejudices. We all have them – to an extent, we need them. It can come as a surprise, however, when somebody has one against you.

            I was on my balcony smoking a cigarette when a car full of South-East Asian Muslims drove by. One of them happened to look a lot like Amrosi, the Bali bomb-plotter. “Fancy being brave enough to drive around looking like Amrosi,” I found myself thinking. “That takes some guts.”

            It wasn’t a malicious thought. It was barely a thought at all. But it stopped me. It got me thinking about friends and family who visit from the country and talk about “playing spot the Aussie”. To my memory, no Aboriginal person has ever made the same remark to me. No need, I hope, to elaborate that point.

            To visiting Caucasians the Asian population of Sydney’s Inner-West are all “chinks”; “slopes”; “fuckin’ gooks”. Those same “Aussies” might spend a moment to reflect that, to a certain generation of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian immigrants, they look just like the people who killed their brothers, raped their sisters and daughters, and burned or bombed their villages – and that it’s for those reasons that they fled their countries to build a new life here.

            The twin sister of prejudice is hypocrisy. Spending a couple of decades in Kings Cross, up to my eyeballs in the drug and sex industries, was a real education in that regard. Nobody does prejudice or hypocrisy like junkies and hookers.

            You have to see it to believe it. It’s really very funny. The dealers look down on the junkies and hookers who provide their living. Most of the hookers and junkies hate their dealers. The sex-workers look down on the junkies. The junkies look down on the sex-workers. Everyone looks down on the ice-freaks.

            And the sex industry’s even better. It’s almost like a caste system, where everybody despises the rungs beneath. The massage-parlour girls think they’re better than the hookers. The brothel workers think they’re better than the street-walkers; the high-class escorts better than both. The strippers think they’re better than all of them. Burlesque performers place themselves above the whole seedy business. And rent-boys? Forget about it – everyone looks down on rent-boys.

            We all need to feel better than somebody – especially if we’re fuck-ups. It’s a comforting thought, as you cry yourself to sleep, that somebody, somewhere, has screwed their life up worse than you have.

            Prejudice is an evolutionary throwback. Our distant forebears, in order to survive, needed to know that certain people, places and things were just bad. Belief is the same. If we had to spend time evaluating every single thought that comes into our heads or every situation or idea we encounter, we’d be simply unable to function.

            So, they’re helpful. That doesn’t mean, though, that we shouldn’t examine them occasionally and re-evaluate them. We all need to take time now and then to look at what we believe and throw out unreasonable prejudices.

            That’s how we avoid becoming assholes.

IRON MIKE

I never did explain my thing about Mike Tyson.

He was my hero. Aged eleven, I considered nobody more worthy of my adulation. It was because of Mike that I’d drag myself out of bed three hours before I had to be ready for school so I could destroy my ankles running around and around my block. Because of Mike I did it again when I got home in the afternoon. And the jumping: the endless, tedious jumping-rope.

            I defended him. Long before Lance Armstrong made us all feel like assholes, I stuck-up for Tyson. When he beat-up his wife I argued with my friends: ‘We don’t know what really happened. Maybe it’s been blown out of proportion. And, anyway, the media needs to leave him alone – it’s just not fair’.

            When he had to postpone a title-fight after breaking his hand on some guy’s head in a night club I figured, ‘Hey, the fool probably deserved it’.

            Then there were the fights. He seemed to stop caring. Guys obviously beaten in the first two rounds would waltz him around the ring for another seven or eight or sometimes the distance. The man who eventually knocked him out in Japan, Buster Douglas, once lost a decision on Tyson’s undercard (The winner of that fight, a thoroughly ordinary monolith named Tony Tucker, went on to tie Tyson up for fifteen whole rounds).

            Then he raped that girl. Even then, knowing he was guilty, the naively adoring part of me rationalised, ‘Sure, he did it – but what the hell was the girl doing there anyway?’ Anything but admit it might be Mike’s fault. If even that didn’t kill the magic, his comeback did. Emerging from prison he phoned-in big money wins against a series of tubby, middle-aged never-weres I probably could have knocked-out.

            When he finally faced a real challenge he was no longer up to it. Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis were good fighters, but neither should have been in Tyson’s league. He knew it too. But they didn’t. Faced, for possibly the first time, with opponents not half-beaten before the opening-bell merely by his reputation, he went to pieces. Thwarted in his old tricks he snapped and bit-off part of Holyfield’s ear.

            By the time he got Lewis into the ring even Mike knew it was all over. As if doing penance he submitted to the mother of all beatings. And if that was the last time we saw him his career, though wasted, would have ended with some dignity.

            But Mike, it seems, doesn’t do dignity. From speaking tours to stupid film appearances via a brief wrestling career he kept the freak-show going. First he became an animal – then he became a joke.

            Tyson should have been great – the greatest. Instead his crash-and-burn dragged Heavyweight boxing down in its wake. That cancer, Don King, had already been white-anting it for a decade, but the wrecking-ball he used to finish the job was Iron Mike Tyson. And my inner eleven year-old has never gotten over it.

I THOUGHT THEY WERE VITAMINS

Greens Senator Richard Di Natale wants a senate inquiry into drugs in sport. He wants leading players and coaching staff from the AFL and NRL to appear and explain how it could have happened. He’s right, they should.

When the ASADA investigation exploded in the media my first response was, “Suffer, scumbag hypocrites”. It seemed like vindication. I and some of the best people I know are viewed as filth by much of society. We will always – no matter what we do to improve ourselves – be defined by what we once did to assuage appalling emotional and psychological damage. Accordingly, every time we let someone new into our lives we face an uncomfortable decision: whether to be honest or lie about a mistake we can’t un-make.

And now here came the nation’s sporting heroes, held up as models of virtue for children to emulate, showered with money, adulation and all the privileges afforded by fame, revealed at last as the cheating thugs some of us have always known them to be.

I was long ago disabused of any romantic notions about footballers or cricketers – fifteen years in Kings Cross, watching them get drunk or wired, start fights, abuse women and generally be obnoxious, took care of that. This recovering junkie felt good knowing the rest of the country finally gets it too. Unlike the rape scandals a couple of years ago, this time there would be no excuses.

But I’ve had some time to think. Senator Di Natale’s proposed inquiry is so important precisely because the drug issue highlights many of the same institutional problems that produced those ugly sex stories.

Take a seventeen-year-old from the suburbs or the bush. Put him in a situation where his only job is to turn up at training and at the game on the weekend; where he’s the subject of hero-worship disproportionate to his actual accomplishment; where he rarely hears the word ‘no’; and where, so long as he keeps winning, his most outrageous behaviour will be excused or covered-up. It doesn’t take a genius to predict the likely result.

Football, by its nature, is a community.  A few leaders come to the fore; the rest are followers. That same seventeen-year-old will be impressionable. He will cast about for role-models. He will accept as normal whatever the coach, officials or prominent players do or say. If he’s told, ‘Take this “supplement”’ – he probably will, whatever his qualms.

A senate inquiry should hear those stories. Not to excuse them – most drug users have an external locus of control; given a chance to blame someone else they will – but to expose the complexities of the issue. It should be more than a public skewering of the end-users and their suppliers.

The players need a chance to take responsibility for their actions; the clubs and governing bodies need to be exposed in their complicity; it needs to be addressed as a cultural issue, not the misbehaviour of a few rogue individuals or clubs.

 And along the way maybe, just maybe, we’ll stumble over a more compassionate, more realistic understanding of the drug problem in the wider community.

Or not ...

MARCH WINDS BLOW COLD

Seasons shift. Time marches on. The icy drizzle of our weird new climate settles over Sydney. On the mute TV the old Pope waves one last time from the balcony then, Nixonesque, boards the holy helicopter into gilded exile. He did what he felt was right.

            My ex-wife has, at long last, found a good man close to her own age and seems ready to settle down; a weight off my mind. My bf has a new tattoo I may never see up-close, thanks to a mutual capacity for emotional denial and poor impulse control.

            One friend prepares to depart these shores and live out his dream of being a successful touring musician. Meanwhile another friend moves to Sydney from the bush to find work and build a new life – his dream of being a champion jockey shattered, with his sternum, pancreas, spleen and most of his bones, in a riding accident.

            My sister’s boyfriend, made redundant a few months ago, consoles himself by purchasing one of those titanic American SUVs. Even my mother contemplates trading-up – a four-wheel drive just big enough for herself, her grand-daughter and her German shepherd.

            The Labor Government marches inexorably toward destruction; the Opposition, and its Howard era front bench, readies itself to revive the good old days of increased middle-class welfare, populist xenophobia, wedge politics and no spending on any infrastructure outside marginal electorates; some things change – others never will.

            And me? I’ve given up on changing. Rather, my project these days is to become more myself. I think it’s going well. In a few weeks I’ll be a qualified copy-editor, and will begin the daunting process of setting-up shop. It’s not exactly the most exciting business, but I’ll be largely my own boss; and it won’t hurt to make a few contacts in the publishing industry.

             My only real worry is that it will chew up time when I could be writing, but somebody once told me that you don’t find time for the important stuff – you make time. Anyway, having to worry less about the little things – like paying the rent and feeding myself – won’t be an unwelcome change. Who knows, I may even end up in a position to keep a roof over someone else’s head while they chase their own dream. I’d like that.

            Or, I could follow the old Pope’s lead and devote the rest of my life to prayer. That always works.