High Season

by Jim Hearn

  ‘Jesse,’ I suggest, ‘go have a cigarette before service. Which means a four-minute break. Everyone can go for a quick smoke before dinner, one at a time, okay?’

  ‘Yes, Chef,’ everyone calls back, except Jesse, who has already gone.

  ‘Carla,’ I say, ‘go easy, for chrissake.’

  ‘He’ll learn,’ she says.

  ‘He’s got a bit going on at the moment, Carla,’ adds Soda.

  ‘He’s a big boy, darling,’ Carla coos across the kitchen to Soda.

  Carla and Soda are like a special club of two, each of them born with something special that most folks don’t get. The thing that divides them, though, is that Carla’s good looks, wit and charm are about fifteen years more used up than Soda’s—and Soda knows enough about life to know he doesn’t want to end up where she is now.

  ‘Why do you always stick up for him anyway, Soda?’ asks Carla, with her serious face on.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Soda shrugs. ‘We’re on the line together.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean he’s always right about things,’ she says.

  ‘I know that,’ Soda says, getting irritated. ‘It’s just the way it is. He sticks up for me and I stick up for him.’

  ‘He wouldn’t stick up for you like you do for him,’ Carla persists.

  ‘Just do the dishes, Carla,’ Soda says, cool as ice. ‘I don’t want to talk about Jesse or me or anything else.

  Just do your job and keep your trap shut.’

  And it’s not as if Carla hasn’t heard it all before. Soda’s the only person in the kitchen who can talk to her like that. They’ve got each other figured out and I don’t interrupt them. The thing about Carla is that she’s a talker, and what she talks about is the same thing a lot of women like to talk about, which is people. And relationships. And it confuses the hell out of the boys, who would rather not talk at all than discuss that stuff. For a moment Carla doesn’t say anything. Which makes everyone happy. And in the silence, we all catch a fleeting glimpse of how stressed out we are, and how much further we’ve got to go in order to get through the rest of this crazy high season.

  26

  No one, least of all me, has ever accused my mother of being overly maternal, but when she phoned me a few days into the shiny New Year, which began with an overdose, I was touched. Indeed, I was in a space that might generally be thought of as very forgiving. After getting sacked from the London Hotel and turning my fat severance envelope into a scrawled list of crazy things to do, I was open to the idea that people could change—that people should change, regularly, mix things up. And they should do this because no one wants to stagnate in life; change is positive, it’s progressive. My greatest problem was that I’d tried a lot of different avenues in order to facilitate meaningful change and each such avenue had ended in a cul-de-sac of crap.

  My mother had decided to do the country New South Wales brothel tour, which was apparently quite lucrative. A tour of duty like that saw a bunch of girls leave Sydney in a rental car or minivan and basically rip things up around various country towns. Someone obviously does all the organising with the local brothels and the word gets passed around the community grapevine and before a struggling young chef can say, ‘How about a small loan, Mum?’ the girls pack up and move on to the next digs.

  The thing is, mid-tour, my mother had been rescued—again—by a small-town Prince Charming who owned the local drive-through liquor store. And he had taken to parading her around the streets like a prized possession and had even made some commitments to give up drinking. In fact, what became apparent talking to my mother was that she was now a New Age freak who was determined to change her life and resolve her past. It sounded to me like she might be amenable to the idea that she owed me something. I figured anyway you looked at it she owed me at least the means to get the fuck out of my desperate situation in Annandale and find alternative accommodation. And because she’d left the rest of the tour party and moved in with Prince Charming, she had a phone number and an address and was open to the idea of a visit. This was good; this was colour and movement, which distracted me from the bleeding obviousness of my own sad demise. So, with a ridiculously optimistic spirit of abandon, I jumped on my unregistered, uninsured and unlicensed motorbike, and drove west into the setting sun.

  To have recently survived a massive overdose and still be semi-using and hanging out was an uncomfortable experience; but riding a very large motorbike made it less painful than it was when sitting in a small room with no money, electricity, gas or phone. The open road, nature, working people who functioned outside of commercial kitchens, these were all things that were fascinating in a flying-by kind of fashion. I had no interest in engaging with anyone; in fact, I was suffering regular anxiety attacks. Every time I passed a police car or idled through a small country town, I felt a cold panic crawl up my spine. I also felt strongly that I was heading for an ending of sorts, that I was going to be stopped or arrested, and the greatest problem with that was the lack of options that being locked in a prison cell presented. My arms were so pockmarked from shooting up, my skin so fiercely unhappy with what was going on inside my body, that the chances of me explaining away my lack of licence and registration to some earnest young copper were next to none.

  I was desperate to give up the drugs. And it wasn’t that I hadn’t been desperate during every other attempt to do so, it was just that life always dished the drugs back up to me in such a way that promised things would be different this time. Only it never was. It was only ever more of the same. And worse than that, what was becoming normal was so far removed from broader societal notions of normalcy that I genuinely feared for my mental health. It was like I was looking for a brick wall to end the madness. I was so worn down from working so many hours in too many different kitchens with such a cocktail of drug addictions clanging around my system, that I was open to anything that presented as a solution to getting straight. I was the perfect candidate for the Scientologists, the Hare Krishnas, various born-again freaks or basically anyone or anything that might offer a solution to my particular set of problems. I understood clearly why semi-intelligent people could believe that human beings were descended from aliens. I would have run with any of it if it had got me straight and ended the madness in my head.

  A lot of people wonder what drives seemingly good people to such ridiculous levels of self-abandonment with drug addiction. Let me tell you, the thing that becomes impossible to escape from in the end, the thing that prolongs the endgame of collapse, is simply the madness of a million incessant, insistent, highly critical, screaming voices inside your head. And the only way to shut them up is with a shot of smack. In the end, all I was doing was killing the voices. I didn’t expect any pleasure or a rush or some cosy stone; those things belonged to more innocent days.

  So as I’m ringing out my Suzuki 1100 to two hundred and forty k an hour along the Snowy Mountains Highway, the idea of crashing or even being killed or ending up in a hospital or wrapped around a tree wasn’t so much the end of the world as the end of madness: a way to shut my fucking head up about a whole lot of shit that I could no longer stand to listen to. It wasn’t like the voices in my drug-fucked mind were delivering new information; it was just madness.

  A doctor later explained to me that the functioning brain can be reduced to a serious of chemical reactions, and that what I was doing by using such a cocktail of self-injected chemicals was creating chaos inside my brain. The voices were chemical reactions gone wrong, misfires, random correcting efforts, various inhibitors reacting against various stimulants. But at the time, well, when I finally pulled into the driveway at Mum’s, I was a little more open than I might normally have been to the notion of some instantaneous New Age cure-all. So when an exorcism was mentioned as a means to rid me of my drug addiction, it made more sense than it should have.

  The idea was that I’d picked up a ‘lost soul’ during one of my overdoses and it was responsible for my drug addiction. I must admit, the
idea that I didn’t have to take any personal responsibility for the last ten years of chaos and torment was appealing. You probably had to be there to believe that such a solution could be met with a straight face, let alone enthusiasm, but like they say in the lower courthouses come Monday morning, ‘It all made sense at the time, Your Honour.’

  A bird’s-eye view of Wagga Wagga in summer reveals a town that is flat and hot. It’s fucking steaming hot. What moisture there is gets shimmered into a mid-morning haze and by lunch you’re ready for an aspirin and a quiet lie down in the broom closet or somewhere else very dark and silent. Frankly, I found the conditions cruel. I’d hung out off smack enough times to lose count but this was something else.

  My mother was highly energised; she was on a mission. There was a problem, which was me, and there was a solution, which was a New Age exorcism. I did ask if we might be able stretch the budget to a Catholic priest, but apparently they were out of fashion. By now I felt so bad that I believed the only thing that might possibly ‘cure’ me or take away the screeching aches and joint pain was a drama big enough to literally scare the fucking creepy-crawlies out of my legs. As such, the actual ceremony whereby the ‘lost soul’ was exorcised from my sweating, pinpricked carcass was all a bit of a let-down. Where I felt the need for fire and brimstone, the New Age priest brought calm and inner focus. Where I felt the need for screaming, blood, guts and glory, the New Age priest brought an elderly woman whose children probably really loved her. She was scared. She was more scared than me in that motel room in Wagga Wagga. She was out-of-her-fucking-depth scared and when I sensed that—when the penny hit the deck and spun—the sound of the spinning represented some kind of death knell.

  The exorcism wouldn’t, shouldn’t and hadn’t worked. After the twenty minutes of quiet mantras and closed-eyed aura waving I hit a new low. And down there, in the deepest valley, where hope has all but gone, one’s mind is reduced to symbols and imagery: the lilies of the field; angry dragons; the eternal prisoner. It was like whatever innocence my soul might have held tight in a piggy bank somewhere, cracked open and spilled out over the barren land that represented all my possible futures. And perhaps someone less leavened by a heroin addiction might have seen that as proof that the exorcism was responsible for a surrender of sorts, but I chose to believe it was the utter failure of the exercise that brought about such a strong sense of hopelessness. Why fight it? my spilling spirit sighed. Once a junkie, always a junkie.

  After the ceremony, I did my best to avoid disappointing my mother and her team of willing helpers. I didn’t want to reject their sincerity or goodwill. All the same, help, that most difficult and nebulous of things—that most easy-to-get-wrong of things—seemed further away than ever.

  I reasoned that if my own mother couldn’t help me, even though she genuinely wanted to, there was little hope that some random other person might be able to. In fact, it seemed that I was going to have to adjust to the reality of a life of crime. The only problem with that was all the romance of such a proposition had been so thoroughly wrung from all my previous efforts that prison was starting to look like not so much a dead-end as the best of all possible outcomes. And yet . . .

  The idea of being a late-twenties sex toy for men twice my size provided sufficient motivation for me to carry on looking for alternative cures. What I didn’t realise at the time was that all my information about what it meant to be a junkie was information that had come from other junkies and irregular snippets from an impossibly biased and uninformed media. While it may seem absurd now, I didn’t know about detoxes or rehabs; I didn’t know about NA meetings or controlled-using programs; and while I had mates on methadone, their general demeanour and sense of wellbeing was not what I was looking for. And I didn’t want to be Straight-backed Sally, either. Really, I didn’t know what I wanted outside of recognising a need to quit using smack.

  Mum and her New Age priest friend created a blue aura around me for the five-hour motorbike ride back to Sydney. And as I sat on the resprayed, matt-black Suzuki 1100 with my helmet pulled down tight, my bony body wrapped in a Stagg leather jacket and Levis 501s, the engine all throaty beneath me, I smiled as I realised I’d be back in Sydney tonight. I knew that it was the end of something. I didn’t know what my next move would be or which town, city or country I would end up in, but I knew it was time to leave the house in Annandale and put some distance between me and Balmain which, as a suburb, was becoming altogether too small and judgemental.

  The idea of being back in Sydney brought with it the realisation that I could get on again before I began sorting out things to do with work and accommodation. I figured I could be out of Sydney in about three or four days and I may as well keep things as simple as possible and continue using until I was some place else. And while that might appear a self-defeating approach to things after my efforts to get off smack, it was actually quite logical. To completely remove the smack from my system as I attempted to bring about some lasting changes would be like sending a starving person to the gym. On some deep level I had surrendered to the idea that ‘my way’ wasn’t working. And while I didn’t yet have any idea about what a better way might look like, life was compelling me on, somewhere. And it was fucking painful. As such, the idea of popping a vein and pushing a shot of smack home saw me tearing up the stretch of country between Wagga Wagga and Sydney in record time.

  The obstacles that stand between a junkie and his obsession are really no obstacles at all. I flew through towns at a hundred and forty k an hour; I overtook buses on narrow stretches of winding road, slumped down over the petrol tank, the engine screaming, hungry for oil. I flew past police cars travelling in the opposite direction that flashed their brake lights before realising the race was over. They couldn’t catch me and they knew it. Maybe I’d crash, maybe I’d die, but if I didn’t, I was racing straight to the Golden Mile.

  As I pushed the motorbike through the outskirts of Sydney and pulled onto Parramatta Road, lights were coming on in buildings as the sun went down on another day. The bike was not happy, coughing and wheezing as I zigzagged between cars on my way up to the Cross. I didn’t think about work or home or Mum or friends; my body was seizing up, knees locked, wrists frozen from four hours on the highway. Dusk is the saddest part of the day when life is getting you down. If hope springs eternal, it’s a morning thing. Come sunset, it’s obvious that any optimism that may have risen with the morning is now so used up it’s not just meaningless, but painfully so.

  But such pain is also comforting when you find a crowd to share the burden with. And up at the Cross, with its massive Coca-Cola sign flicking across the night sky, a madcap collection of optimists down on their luck shared the stage. As soon as I revved up Victoria Road I felt better than I had in weeks. I’d borrowed a few hundred from my mother and was confident I could be styling in no time flat. I parked the bike, slotted the helmet and headed up to see the girls.

  It’s rare, but sometimes everything goes right for a junkie looking to get on. I’ve seen it happen for others and shaken my head and wondered how they did it. Most times I just put it down to the last dregs of charm. But when I spotted an old friend from the Bondi days and he hooked me up with the shiniest of the local crew and I got to put my shot away in a nicely tiled bathroom in one of the better restaurants on the main drag, the relief was such that I cried. It wasn’t the sadness of using again or of being a hopeless junkie; they were tears for the end of pain. And when I joined my friend in the restaurant, I spotted a chef I knew working in the open kitchen who insisted on cooking dinner for me and my old mate Paul. And who was I to argue? I knew things couldn’t last, but tonight I was back and I was grateful.

  It was a mistake to let the motorbike cool down. After dinner and scoring some takeaway smack, I slid back onto the bike, turned the key and pushed the electric ignition. Nothing. And it wasn’t just nothing, it was super-sized nothing. I tried the kick-start but that made such a sick gurgling noise that I knew my run of go
od fortune had just ended. I didn’t fight it; I was fully Buddha about such things now that I was comfortably off-chops. So I headed up to the taxi rank and caught a ride home to Annandale.

  Walking into a house where the essential services have been cut for a couple of weeks is weird. It’s like it smells of people, but no one lives there any more. When my two flatmates appeared, they weren’t actually too concerned about the no-electricity thing. In fact, they’d adapted to their off-the-grid existence by constructing an elaborate fire-in-a-drum situation in the back garden. The resilience was touching, inspirational even, but the smell . . . Where the boys wouldn’t go was the cold shower.

  They seemed pleased to have me back, at least until I started talking about how it was probably time to move on and go our separate ways. It was then that they started to talk about what could be done to heat cold water, how they might be able to construct a boiler system with elaborate pulleys and strings . . .

  ‘Boys,’ I said, ‘we haven’t paid the rent in over a month. How long do you reckon they’re going to let us stay?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Dave. ‘I might crash with my mate over in Balmain.’

  ‘Is he looking for flatmates, is he?’ asked Benny, his voice hopeful.

  ‘No, mate, he’s not,’ replied Dave.

  ‘But he’s a mate?’ enquired Benny.

  ‘He’s my mate, mate,’ said Dave.

  ‘Yeah, but we’re all mates, Dave,’ said Benny.

  ‘Fellas,’ I said, ‘we’ve got twenty-four hours and we’re out the door. All right?’

  They nodded, accepting the inevitable.

  ‘How’s the bike going, Jimmy?’ said Benny.

  ‘Yeah, not good, mate,’ I replied. ‘It’s still up the Cross. I think I’ve blown the conrod.’

  ‘But you’re not sure,’ said Benny, ever hopeful.

  ‘Yeah, no, I am sure, mate. The conrod’s come out the side of the casing.’