by Luke Davies
I explained to the teller that I’d just received this check from the Grosvenor Insurance Company, and that I needed the cash right away. I said that I assumed that since it was a corporate check, from the company across the road, made out to my name, and since I had several forms of ID—here I pulled Roger’s cards from his wallet—it would be no problem to put it through my account and cash it immediately.
The teller said he’d have to check with the manager. The manager carefully studied my deposit and withdrawal slips, and the Grosvenor check, and the Westpac Keycard. He looked over at me briefly and then, to my great surprise, nodded his head.
I felt like cheering but it stayed inside. It was a time for decorum as I collected my $949 in cash. I said thank you to the teller and left the bank at a moderate pace, but with a spring in my step. It was nine-fifteen and I had $2,232 in my wallet, which was once Roger’s wallet.
I was feeling fucking great.
At 9:25 I opened the door to the warehouse. Candy was naked on the couch, hunched over, painting her toenails. She looked up with a hopeful smile as I came in.
“So how’d it go?”
I tried to play a little joke. I pulled a sad face and shook my head and said, “It fucked up.”
But a smile broke out on me before I’d even finished saying the words. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the wallet and showered the money all over her. “Only joking,” I said. We both started laughing hysterically. Candy jumped up and down and hugged me.
“Baby, baby, baby!” she squealed.
She had her arms around my neck. I was rubbing my hands over her back and buttocks, looking down at the hundreds and fifties and twenties scattered around our feet.
“Let’s make a phone call,” I said.
“Kojak or Lester?” she asked.
Later in the day we were pretty fucking comfortable. Pretty happy. Fucking stoned. We were on the couch in the warehouse. I was having trouble opening my eyes. My mind was doing that thing, you know the thing, kind of like zooming over landscapes. Gliding through the ether. Never happened much anymore.
In the middle of my immense and exquisite warmth I pictured Roger, sitting nervously on a bench in a park in Collingwood. I knew he would not still be there, but in my mind it was the only way I could picture him.
Lightly built with sharp features and short dark hair. Blue eyes. A few pimples. Wearing a denim jacket. A neatly dressed guy, with white runners, Reeboks maybe. His eyes scan the horizon. And he looks at his watch a lot. Then he starts looking behind him, left and right, trying to work out where the fuck I might appear from. Hoping I’m running late. Forcing himself to believe in his heart that I’m just running late.
So much of my own life seemed to be spent waiting on park benches, knotted with stomach cramps and trying to look casual, willing the dealer to arrive. Roger was no more than a ghost to me. But it was during my own long waits in parks—they say that if you’ve been a junkie for ten years, you will have spent seven of them waiting—that I began to realize that I myself was becoming transparent. That I myself may well have been a ghost, and that I was haunting my own body, just as the image of Roger would occasionally haunt my mind.
CRABS
Let me tell you about the crabs.
Things were fucked up, as always. But not too bad. Candy had a good job in a brothel in East Melbourne—day shift, the boss liked her, she’d been there two months, hadn’t caused any trouble, was earning heaps—so I didn’t have a great deal to do with my time, except wait for Candy and the money to come home. After that it was my job to get the dope, or do any other drug-related things—credit card stuff, check fraud, whatever came up.
In a way, Candy was like the steady income, the bottom line, and I was on special teams. The bottom line averaged about four hundred a day, but sometimes we had tight two-hundred-dollar days or good thousand-dollar days. Either way, it all went up our arms. Four hundred was subsistence, a thousand was a bonus day. This is above average for shit-kicker junkies, but like I’ve said, Candy had the looks.
Sometimes, for whatever reasons, we ran out of money and gear. Candy would go to work not feeling so good and I would sit at home watching Here’s Humphrey or The Young and the Restless and not feeling so good either. Then she’d ring me after she’d done her first client for the day. She’d dress sensibly—put on an overcoat, at least—and go outside the brothel and up the road to meet me. I’d come by in a cab and get the money. Go get the dope. Have a blast. The world feels fine.
When you’ve been hanging out and you have a hit and get that relief then at last you can think about things like breakfast. A chocolate milk and a jelly doughnut. Buy a packet of cigarettes and you feel like a king.
But I never fucked around for too long in such circumstances because I knew Candy was back there in the brothel doing the hard slog: getting pins and needles and beginning to sweat and touching hairy men.
So I’d load her a syringe and go back to the brothel, pretending to be a customer. They put you in a waiting room and the girls came in one by one.
They’d say, “Hi, I’m so-and-so.”
I’d say, “Hi.”
Then they’d leave the room. It was pretty appalling.
At the end of it, you go back to reception and say, “I’ll have her, thanks.” But when Candy came in I’d give her the syringe and say, “How’s things?” and “I’ll see you tonight.” She’d leave the room and then I’d go out to the foyer and say, “Thanks, but I’ve changed my mind.”
Mostly we didn’t have to worry about this kind of shit, because, as I said, it was a pretty comfortable time. The main thing I remember from this few months is that I read everything by Graham Greene, Len Deighton, and Robert Ludlum. Deighton and Ludlum—heroin helps you concentrate on stuff like that, helps you settle into the plot convolutions. Greene is good at any time.
Anyway, the crabs. One of the hazards of the job. You got crabs, you went to the pharmacy, you bought the crab lice lotion, you got rid of them.
Not us.
Maybe our lives were a little limited. But to be invaded by such predators was a fascinating thing. These were primeval creatures that lived on blood, as we did. Creatures that pierced the skin and jacked back blood and existed for one purpose only, as we did.
What’s more, as a heroin addict I was always happy picking and squeezing and prodding. Monkeys have less going on in the way of higher brain function and more in the way of brain-stem activity than humans. Less neocortex and more cerebellum. At the zoo you can see how happy they are picking nits from each other’s hair. This is the primal business. Which heroin reinvents, as it so sensually overwhelms the brain stem.
That’s why on heroin you can spend four hours squeezing blackheads that aren’t even there. That you wish were there. Not even the monkeys know such sophisticated pleasures.
So you can see how the arrival of the crabs would be an exciting event, like a festival. We all want festivals to last. Through the night, at least.
When the itching gets so bad that you actually notice it through the sense-numbing wall of the heroin, then you know you have a serious infestation.
The first thing Candy and I did was mix up and have a blast. Then we took scissors and cut our pubic hair down to a basic manageable five or six millimeters, a kind of pubic crew cut. I thought this looked pretty silly on me, with my dick looking goofy and exposed, but of course from Candy’s point of view it was all the rage and quite a money spinner in the brothels.
We were a tight team, so none of this was in any way embarrassing. It was microscopic and medical and not much different from watching a good documentary on television.
Down to business. With a pair of very sharp nail scissors we took turns extracting the individual monsters from our skin.
Crab lice have eight legs. Each leg has a sharp prong or barb, as on a surveyor’s tripod or a whaler’s harpoon, for gaining a firmer hold.
Of course they must also have some kind of punctur
ing and sucking device for getting the blood, but I couldn’t actually see this. I just saw the huge rust-colored bulge of their bodies and the dainty flailing of their transparent legs when we pulled them from our skin.
It was a long night because we inspected each specimen one at a time. I sifted Candy’s spiky pubes under my thumb or index finger. I would see something that looked like a tiny freckle or a faint blemish, gently prod its edge with the point of the scissors, and begin to lift. If you listened really carefully you could hear a faint ripping sound as the legs began to tear loose from the skin.
I’d slide the scissors in between the legs and under the body. Then lift straight upward, with a finger hovering to trap the creature gently on the flat blade.
As the crab came loose from the skin, we would inspect it. There weren’t really any criteria of excellence other than size.
“Look at that, that’s fuckin’ huge!”
We worked a wide area around each other’s groins, shining the lamp in close. They were everywhere. I worked downward from the top of Candy’s pubic hair and along the lips of her cunt, outward to her upper legs and around to her arse. There were crabs on the rim of her sphincter. I’d never seen a sphincter at such close range, under a hundred-watt bulb. I was surprised at the reflex action it made—a kind of puckering—when I touched its edge carefully with the point of the scissors.
We killed them between two thumbnails, watching the body distort. Then a clear cracking sound, and the body was flat, surrounded by a small field of red.
In a way it was sad to be so thorough, to know that before the night was over we would have them all. So we left the eggs alone. These were tiny white dots laid on the base of a pubic hair. To get rid of them you had to clamp them tightly between two fingernails and pull upward along the hair. But this was nowhere near as exciting as the crab-lifting.
At any rate, our theory regarding the eggs was like good fisheries management: you don’t kill the young, so you’ve got plenty of adults later on. We imagined we might still be interested in doing this the next day, maybe even the day after.
But after a few hours we got bored of the killing. We began to collect them. This was more fun. Soon we had a herd of them, all fighting over each other on the arid glass stretch that was the inside curve of one of the lenses of my sunglasses.
From the crabs’ point of view this must have been a bloodless wasteland, a place of utter desolation. What did the crabs need to live? Blood. What did we have regular access to? Our blood. It was three A.M., time for a little nightcap before bed; time also to feed the crabs, to succor them in their last hours.
We mixed up again and shot up. Normally I liked a 1 mil Terumo syringe (nondetachable head, of course) to be filled to about 70, and after I’d plunged the shot right in I would jack back once or twice to 20 or 30. The idea was, you get all that blood back in there, rinse out the barrel, don’t miss the skerrick of heroin that might be left in the tiny steel cylinder of the needle itself.
This time, after I’d injected the heroin, I jacked all the way but didn’t push back in, so I pulled from my arm a syringe of thick crimson.
“Hey, Candy, check this out.”
I was worried about those crabs. Maybe they’d become addicted to the heroin in our blood, and the blind tumbling and clawing and frenzy that could be witnessed in my sunglasses was actually the insane and absurd pain of withdrawal.
I isolated a crab from the main pack. I started with just a drop of blood, protruding from the needle of my syringe. It hovered like a holy balloon, the single drop bigger than the crab’s entire body. It touched the broad back of the crab but maintained its globular shape. Then it burst.
The crab was instantly saturated. You could see its legs buckle beneath it and imagine it was experiencing something similar to the bliss of overdose.
With the scissors I pushed the other crabs around the outer rim of the lens. I squirted some more blood, and a small lake formed in the middle, where the lens reached its lowest point. Candy watched all this intently and gave suggestions and strategies.
Within twenty minutes we had created a scene of bucolic bliss. All around the edges of the lake of blood were gathered like cows a hundred docile and happy crabs. Traumatized by the ordeal of the scissors, they drank in bliss from the healing depths.
As I said, things were fucked up, but not too bad. There were moments soon after a shot when the whole world seemed at peace.
We joked about breeding a race of monster crab lice, about joining the circuit and entering them in all the shows. But in reality I didn’t want to go to bed with the thought of those things climbing over the edge of my sunglasses and going off to explore other parts of the warehouse.
The game was over and the time for death had arrived. We killed them quickly, crack crack crack for half an hour, and went to bed.
In the morning we got up and had a hit and Candy went off to work. I started reading Our Man in Havana, which was a pretty interesting book.
BOOKS
Here’s the kind of trouble I could get myself into by myself. This is just a three-week period. Something like that. Maybe only two.
Candy hadn’t been feeling too good in the stomach. She’d had diarrhea for about a week, which didn’t make sense, given the amount of heroin we were using.
One night she came home at five A.M. from a Sultan’s Harem shift. I woke briefly and we organized the morning activities. Candy counted out two hundred fifty dollars from her earnings and I set the alarm.
I woke when it went off at nine. I paged Kojak and he called me right back. I caught a cab out to meet him on Dandenong Road, at Caulfield. As usual I sat in a tram shelter and waited for fifteen minutes. At least once you got onto him and made arrangements, Kojak was reliable. He was never more than half an hour late. I got a two hundred off him and caught a cab home. At the café beneath the warehouse I bought two ham and cheese croissants and two take-out coffees.
It was the way Candy liked it, and fair enough too. It was the least I could do, considering I did fuck all. I came in the door at about ten-thirty.
“Coffee’s up!”
I was in a good mood. The dope in your pocket, how could you not be?
Candy stirred. She sat up and stretched her arms and climbed down from the bed alcove. A new bright day beginning. I was mixing up already.
“How are you, baby?”
I leaned across to kiss her as she sat down. Suddenly I gasped.
“Shit, Candy!”
Candy was bright yellow. I mean, electric yellow, fluorescent yellow. Her whole face. Her eyes, where they should have been white, were neon yellow. I’d seen the jaundiced tinge of hepatitis on many people, but I’d never seen anything like this before.
“What is it?” she asked. She saw the alarm in my face.
“Oh fuck. You should see yourself. Bright yellow. You’ve got hepatitis.”
She ran to the mirror, inspected herself. “Shit.”
It happened just like that. It came on that fast. One day she was marble white, the next, canary yellow. There was no way she could work. After we had a hit we went to the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital. We figured we’d find out what to do to knock the hep on the head as quickly as possible, to get back to our normal lives.
But they took one look at her and put her into a sealed room. Candy was under quarantine. It might as well have been house arrest.
Two weeks at least, they said. She’s not going anywhere.
They grabbed me too, took blood, asked if we’d been sharing needles, told me I’d be lucky if I didn’t have it myself. When they’d finished, I asked if I could go say goodbye to Candy. They said, “Just don’t be long. She needs to start resting.” Candy looked gaunt and emaciated in the dimly lit quarantine room.
“This is a nightmare,” she said. “How am I going to get dope?”
“I don’t know, Candy, I don’t know. I’ll try and bring you some.”
“Please try, baby. Please help
me.” Her eyes were wide with fear.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “But make sure you stress that you’re a heroin addict. They’re a public hospital. I think they’re obliged to give you methadone. I’m not sure, but I think so.”
“Yeah, I’ll do that. But still, try and bring me a taste.”
I stroked her yellow hands. By the time I left the hospital in the afternoon, she’d entered a kind of delirium. She would stay that way for two weeks. Luckily, they did give her methadone, which was a blessing, since I was hardly the man on the spot to be bringing in the grams of pure. It seemed to be all I could do to look after myself, and that very badly.
It was such a hostile universe: I got arrested twice in the next few weeks. They were both dumb events, but the first one was particularly dumb. It was just a pair of ten-dollar earrings from Sportsgirl, something to make Candy feel better. But I walked outside the shop and felt the shop detective’s hand on my arm. “Can you come with me?” All that crap. I couldn’t believe they even bothered with the police. The cops were bored, took me back to the station, did the paperwork, let me go with a date to appear.
Most days I stole books. This was a labor-intensive form of crime, long hours for low rewards. I was always tired and never stoned enough. But in the second week I got hold of a credit card from O’Brien—plastic wasn’t his thing—and it’s how I got arrested the second time.
I acted quickly when I got the card. I had a good Saturday buying books from various places and selling them to a secondhand dealer in Carlton. Recent-release hardbacks, biographies, “serious” novels—stuff like that was always the best for resale, and that’s what I concentrated on.
I lulled myself into a false sense of security, telling myself that card cancellations don’t get run through the computer on the weekends. I used all my dope on the Saturday night, thinking Sunday would take care of itself. It did, but not how I expected.