Iraqi Icicle

by Bernie Dowling

  Mick put one of his cassettes in my car player, and we said little until we passed Beenleigh. Then he turned the volume right down and asked me if I knew anything about drug testing. I confessed my ignorance and added, perhaps a tad self-righteously, that I’d never had an interest in the subject.

  ‘Bad mistake, Steele,’ Mick replied. ‘You need to know every facet of the racing industry that might affect your livelihood. If there are trainers out there who have the good gear and it’s untraceable, you wanna know about it.’

  I had to disagree, on the grounds that the research was too hard and too uncertain. ‘You’d go batty believing every racetrack rumour about top trainers going overseas for the latest big hits. And you’re not going to ring them up to ask if they’re putting their underachievers on the needle. Besides, I have suspicions that dopers are not nice people.’

  ‘All probably true,’ Mick conceded. ‘But I should still follow my own advice about being mindful of doping. I might see patterns emerging, when certain horses run differently from how they statistically should. Anyway, Steele, you’re the one who has me engrossed in drug research over the past couple of days.’

  I asked Mick what he had come up with, running the stats on those weird personal computers of his. The teenager was upset about my characterisation of his cherished technology. ‘You know how you were talking about rumours of trainers travelling overseas for drugs? I had to fly to America for my two personal computers. We won’t have these beauties in Australia for months, maybe for a couple of years. This is me going to a crowded airport, to catch a crowded plane to a country with lots of people. It was serious stuff. Only a punter or a bookie with access to a mainframe computer, and the ability to talk to it, can generate more information than I can. It’s all about playing the percentages and margins, and my two babies are giving me the edge. Hey, Yatala turn-off coming up; we gotta pull over for a couple of pies.’

  Yatala, a seaside hamlet before Southport, had a reputation for the best meat pies in Australia, which aficionados figured made them the best pies in the world. When I was a child, a nun gave me a cold meat pie leaving me with me an antipathy to the humble delicacies, but I keep that to myself. You don’t deride an Aussie icon until you work out the depth of the fervour of the worshipper you’re with. Mick was pretty fervent.

  He refused to say a word until he had applied the contents of his plastic sachet of tomato sauce to the hole he made in the mushy peas adorning the top of his pie. I watched his ritual closely, not wanting to munch into my lowly sausage roll before he savoured his first bite.

  Mick finally rolled up the last crumbs of his pie into the greaseproof paper, put that inside his paper bag, and placed that in the rubbish bin beside the table in the park where we were dining. He drank his coffee-flavoured milk and lit a cigarette before resuming his conversation of ten minutes before about running the stats on his personal computers.

  ‘People are always asking me for tips, yet no one ever asks me why I win at the horses. It’s like asking me if I can give them a fish, when they should be asking me how to fish.’

  ‘Why do you win at the horses, Mick?’

  ‘Why do you win at poker, Steele?’

  ‘That’s different. No poker player has a mathematical advantage over another, and no gambling house or bookie is taking a percentage of the winnings. That’s why social poker playing is illegal and betting on horses is legal. Bookies and governments are copping a quid out of it.’

  ‘Oh you cynic, Steele Hill. But you’re right about the maths of social poker. In bookmaker’s terms, the book is betting at 100 percent, with no outside party taking a cut and the money all staying among the players. But you win the most, because you are the only one consciously working out the odds of each hand and betting accordingly. I do the same at the horses. And I win.’

  If Mick expected me to thank him profusely for his sage advice, he’d made an error in judgement. ‘Hang on, Mick. We both know that bookies and totes take out between 8 percent and almost 20 percent on any particular race. The tote can never lose, because it adjusts the pool all the time before the horses jump. Bookies sometimes lose, because they adjust their markets as they go along, but punters will not put as much on particular horses as the prices say they might. But still, bookies have always got that 8 percent to 20 percent gross margin working in their favour.’

  Mick shook his head. ‘Which means no punter should ever win.’

  ‘And in the long run they all lose,’ I agreed.

  ‘If that’s true, it makes professional punters the biggest mugs of all, and we both know there are some pretty shrewd gamblers among them. Pro punters are human – sometimes they bet against the correct odds, and sometimes they have trouble working out the correct odds – but so do bookies. A bookie’s odds are made up from statistics and subjective assessments. It is unscientific, unmathematical. So I redo the maths, solve the problem, and come up with reliable predictions which, in some races, overcome the percentage points’ advantage a bookie has over me.’

  I began the walk back to the car. ‘That makes sense. By the way, Mick, how do you fish properly?’

  Mick threw his flavoured milk in another bin. ‘How the fuck would I know?’

  We settled back into the ute, and were on the highway before Mick talked doping again. ‘The number one conclusion I have drawn,’ he began, ‘is that dope detectors do not have it easy. You see, Steele, you can’t just throw some chemicals in with a blood or urine sample, and get a computer printout saying this horse is full of caffeine, amphetamines, cordial, apple juice and, of course, horse-piss. The scientists have to make a specific test for a specific drug. Which puts someone with a new go-fast in a promising position.’

  I wondered out loud if Mick was trying to snow me into feeling more confident about our dangerous endeavour. He swore he wasn’t.

  ‘Not at all, Steele. Think about it. What is most fascinating about all the rumours we hear of top trainers bringing in new drugs from overseas, or of drugging their horses in general? The rumour mill never says that the trainers are paying off the dope-testing officials, which is where you’d think a shrewd doper would start. Think about it, Steele. A list of the drugs and banned substances a race club tests for would be worth gold.’

  I agreed it would. If the list was accurate, you could just give the horse a go-fast not on the list, and, if it worked as the chemists said it would, home free you would be, with a wad of cash in your pocket and a finger in the air to the racing authorities. I was much relieved that Mick Clarence had secured the precious list.

  ‘I have not got that list,’ Mick said.

  If the lad in the front seat of the EH saw my disappointment, his only comeback was a big grin. ‘It’s good that we haven’t got the list; it would make us too complacent. Now, we use our brains and our cunning to come up with the desired result.’

  I asked Mick what our combined intellectual capacities had come up with, as I had zero to contribute.

  ‘It’s not some combination of heroin, speed and coke, which would be the obvious choice. I believe some greyhound trainers and owners use a combo of smack for the hit and speed for the stamina. Greyhound racing’s a mug’s game anyway, so I’ve never bothered to find out how much reward is in the cocktail.’

  I wondered about the lad’s contempt for greyhound racing. The sport’s advocates say it’s smarter to punt on than the ponies, because the dish lickers don’t have the complications of a jockey aboard.

  ‘You have no flattering words for the greyhound industry, Mick. Did you do a lot of dough on the puppies?’

  ‘I don’t bet on greyhounds,’ he said sullenly.

  ‘You have a lot of inside drum on greyhounds for someone without any interest in punting on them, Mick. Are you collecting info that might come in handy one day?’

  ‘My Dad owned and trained greyhounds for years.’

  ‘Have you talked him into giving it away, Mick, and getting a real job like punting on the ponies?�
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  ‘He sent Mum down to the tote one day to take a treble on the afternoon greyhounds, and she came home to see he’d shot his brains out all over the kitchen wall. He had the radio on, but the first leg of his treble hadn’t even run. Mum said she could never understand why he did it.’

  Mick Clarence turned up the music, then shouted across the blare, ‘Adults are fucked.’

  He had regained his usual happy demeanour by the time we had to decide whether to take the coast road to the New South Wales border, or to travel inland through Nerang. Mick said he wanted to see the tanned bodies and fried brains of the Gold Coasties. He switched off the music, wound down his window and pointed to the signpost heralding the coast road.

  It was a warm day with a refreshing breeze, and we had a while to go before we crossed the border into northern New South Wales, which seemed to be our general objective. I was yet to ask my fellow traveller where we were heading. Mick would surely tell me when we were nearing our destination, which I guessed would be a happy hippie home with a cupboard full of exotic pharmaceuticals.

  On the footpath to our left, half-naked men and women, children and geriatrics, carrying such religious totems as ice creams, soft drinks, towels, sun lotion, transistor radios and paperback novels, offered their bodies to the Sun God,

  I had spent a lot of my youth hanging about the Gold Coast; not just at the racetrack, but on the beach, in nightclubs, bars and cafés. Yet I always felt a bit of a stranger there. When I see a thin, dark-brown adult body lying on a beach towel, to me it looks unfulfilled. I always feel that it should be weightlifting at the gym for hours each day, and pouring strange powders over its breakfast cornflakes, before strutting down streets, glancing at its own bod in department-store windows. Suntans sit most easily on bulging-muscled, thin-brained narcissists, or so I judge it.

  They tell me the sun gives you vitamins and is good for you, unless, of course, it gives you cancer; then it’s not so good for you. As a compromise, maybe we should take our doses of sunshine in less full-on conditions than beaches provide. Serial sunshine abusers could be locked up and shown bad American surf movies of the 1950s, 60s and 70s for hours at a stretch, to help free them from their habit. Lifesavers could announce regularly over the loudspeakers, reports have confirmed that it is almost the 1990s; the 1970s have indeed finished, and narcissism and exhibitionism are no longer compulsory. Anyone trying for a suntan should leave the beach immediately.

  We passed through the Gold Coast beach hamlets, and crossed the border at Tweed Heads. I asked Mick whether the EH was pointing in the right direction. He said we should travel along the coast road for a while and then turn inland, looking for farmland. I asked whose farm and Mick replied, anybody’s farm.

  ‘We are gathering magic mushrooms of the golden-topped variety,’ he said merrily.

  ‘They better be to help you think, Mick,’ I said. ‘Because we can’t go feeding gold tops to a racehorse.’

  26

  GOLD-TOP MUSHROOMS are hallucinogens. They contain the active ingredient psilocybin, or so amateur pharmacists investigating cheap thrills tell me. These shrooms grow very nicely in cow manure and, as the cattle farms near the cities were sold up for acreage residentials from the 1970s, their supply decreased in the 1980s.

  As far as I know, urban hippies, grazing in the country, discovered magic mushrooms, of which gold tops were one variety. The popularity spread throughout the 1970s. The definitive Australian history of hallucinogens is yet to be written, so Buddha knows who was chomping on these mushies in the years before their colonisation by the hippies.

  One amateur historian tells me adolescent country boys, never known for temperance, indulged in the mushrooms but they sparked what was considered bizarre behaviour. The lads reverted to strong rum, which prompted acceptable misbehaviour such as fist fights round midnight and verbal abuse of young women.

  Mick pointed to a paddock after we had negotiated enough back roads that I only had a hazy notion of the direction towards the coast. Still, I was confident I could follow my nose home again, as long as I left the devouring of the mushies to my mate.

  We had hardly seen a car in the fifteen minutes before we reached the paddock, so it felt safe enough, though I drove the EH across a stretch of grass to park under a tree out of sight of the road.

  Mick walked over to the paddock, enclosed by a wooden post-and-rail fence, and climbed between two rails. I leaned on the fence to look towards the road and the hilltop farmhouse, the best part of a kilometre away. Binoculars are almost as much loved in the bush as guns, so I was hoping that no one was enjoying a magnified view of our goings-on from the house on the hill. From deep in the paddock, Mick yelled to me. ‘I need your help here, Steele.’

  I walked over to him and saw he held about a dozen small to medium shrooms, with a gold ring around the top of each of their crowns.

  ‘How many of them do you want?’ I asked, thinking Clarence was looking greedy already, as one or two mushrooms was considered a standard dose.

  Mick’s eyes were still scouring the ground for the illegal fungi.

  ‘We need as many as we can get,’ Mick said, ‘a hundred or 150, if we can.’

  Only a lunatic would want that many – perhaps a loon who planned to feed most of them to a horse. We searched every centimetre of that paddock, without any hassles from the police or the farm owner. After a while, Mick had to take off his T-shirt to use as a bag for the mushrooms. Back at the EH, I found an old string shopping bag in the boot and we transferred the fungi there, counting 116 mushrooms. Now Mick could wear his cool T-shirt again, and not have to show off his thin, pale body for comparison with the tanned hides of the disciples of the Sun God.

  ‘We going home?’ I asked Mick. ‘We’re loaded up with what we came for, so let’s get out of here before our hair starts to turn blond and we develop an addiction to hamburgers and milkshakes.’

  We made a concession to our surroundings by going for a swim in the ocean, near Burleigh. Mick wore his jeans into the sea, while I swam in my dress shorts. Judging from our swimwear, you might gather that neither of us brought a towel, and we sat on the bonnet of the EH to sun-dry ourselves. However, being Brissie boys with only a casual exposure to sunbathing, we quickly lost patience with that and were content to drip water on the seat of the EH ute. By the time we were on Brissie’s outskirts, our clothes were pretty dry.

  Back in Mick’s unit, we spread the mushrooms out on a tea towel on the coffee table in the lounge. Mick discarded the three poisonous toadstools among the crop, lit a cigarette and lay back in his armchair to contemplate a large quantity of potential go-fast. I sat in the small kitchen chair across from the young man and stared at our haul.

  ‘Them’s a lot of mushies; do we need that many?’ I asked.

  Mick also stared at the bounty. ‘I think so. I had a law student visit me one day and he was eating them like salted peanuts. He was still standing when he left, a few hours later. He was a big fella, but a fraction of the half-tonne a horse tips the scales at.’

  ‘How are you going to feed them to Who Loves Yer Baby?’ I was curious.

  ‘I’ll work that out with Bill Smith. Ask him to come over on Wednesday night. We may have to practise to get the dose right.’

  ‘That’s the tricky part awlright. How’ll we know the right dose?’

  ‘I really haven’t a clue. In case something goes wrong, Steele, I hope you don’t think this is science. You’ll have to make sure to free Smith’s daughter before Saturday’s race.’

  ‘You’re right. I’ll try, Mick. So, how did you come up with the idea of using mushies, anyway?’

  He lit another cigarette, though there was hardly room for one more butt in the crammed ashtray. ‘It was like I was trying to tell you on the way down in the car.’

  That must have been when our conversation diverted to the subjects of greyhounds, and how his old man topped himself. Mick had clammed right up, but now he continued where he had left
off.

  ‘As I was saying, a few dodgy characters among the greyhound crowd use a mixture of heroin or coke and speed. That’s mainly on suburban tracks, where they’re racing for a betting plunge rather than for prize money.’

  He digressed. ‘If it made the papers, reporters would call that “a cocktail of drugs”. Whenever some evildoer flirts with more than one drug, it’s a cocktail. Reporters make drug addicts out to be swallowing half a chemist shop. I guess in the media’s defence, a lot of cocktails only have a couple of . . .’

  ‘Mick, will you get on with it?’ I said, exasperated.

  ‘Sorry, Steele. It’s the way I think these unscientific cases through, bouncing one idea off another. As I said, we don’t know what the drug detectors can or cannot test for. I’d suspect that heroin, coke and speed would be high up on their lists. Even if they weren’t, we wouldn’t have a clue what dose to give the horse. We would really be in it if our champion dropped dead from a heart attack before our eyes, and the eyes of thousands of other punters, not to mention the stewards.’

  ‘Mick,’ I said testily, to give him a hurry-along. So far, his leisurely story was not letting through many rays of sunlight.

  ‘All bloody right, Steele. You’d think you’d have a little sympathy for my medical condition. You realise I have limited social interaction, so I like to tell my tales slowly.’

  I gave up. ‘Awlright, Mick. I’ll ignore the fact this place is like Central Station and agree about your limited social interaction. We’re all counting on you, so I’ll let you go on with it, any way you want.’

  He took me at my word. Instead of continuing, he sat down cross-legged beside the mushrooms. He picked up a handful, sniffed them and rolled them around his palm with his fingers. Then he put them back, grabbed a second bunch with his left hand and repeated the ritual, finally stabbing his right index finger into the air in triumph.