by Luke Davies
I was offended now. “What’s your fucking problem?” I snapped.
“You’re my fucking problem. You’re a waste of space.”
“I’m a waste of space?” Repetition. It was the last refuge of the brain dead. “Jesus, Candy.” I was searching for a comeback. “I’d think you had your period but I know you never get them these days.”
It was a low dig.
“Yeah, I never get my period because my body’s all fucked up and out of whack because of this fucking drug that you’ve led me into.”
“Oh, right. Like I held a gun to your head, is it?”
She was concentrating on mixing up the dope in the spoon.
“Eh? Held you down and hit you up, did I?”
“Fuck you,” she said.
“Fuck you too, Candy.”
I didn’t want to fight but it was hard to back down. Heroin was not designed to go hand in hand with stress. I slammed the door and walked outside, into the city crowds. I walked for an hour or more. I found myself in the State Library and wandered around for a while. I leafed through a book of photos from Life magazine, and another book of photos of houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Picture books were easier. Then I came home. Of course I wanted to sulk. But I couldn’t stand the thought of being away from the dope for too long.
But Candy had it in for me that day, and the bickering continued into the night. She wanted a reaction. As usual, I felt nothing but the desire not to have a confrontation.
Something was beginning to give for Candy. A seismograph in Sydney feels the distant rumbling of a profound rupture in the earth’s crust a thousand kilometers away, beneath the ocean floor. In the same way, through all the distance laid down by heroin, I was registering a flutter of discontent. God only knows what that flutter was like inside Candy. A deafening upheaval, I suppose. I was sure I loved her, but it seemed that no matter how hard I tried, smack came first.
I was trying to ignore her. I was not a sophisticated unit. “Shhh! I’m watching TV.”
“I said, when are we going to stop using?”
“Whenever you like, Candy. Whenever you like.”
“What, tomorrow, then?”
“Okay, fuck, tomorrow. I don’t care. Tomorrow we stop using.”
“Listen to me!”
She stamped her foot. I looked away from the TV and our eyes met. She was crying.
“Don’t you see what this is doing to me?”
“Candy,” I said, “I don’t want to fight. Look, I just don’t see what your problem is tonight. We have a life. It’s neither good nor bad, okay?”
She laughed an unpleasant snigger and looked around the room as if there was an audience.
“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” she asked. “Our life is more than bad. It’s utterly fucked. And you are evil.”
They seemed such heavy words in the cold stark warehouse.
“Oh yeah, right, I’m evil. Now I think you’ve gone too far, Candy. Goebbels was evil. Adolf fucking Hitler was evil. Put things in perspective, eh?”
“Do you know what I do all day and night to earn the money that we put up our arms?”
I closed my eyes. It was like the question that dare not speak its name.
“Candy … I know. You know … you know I’m not happy … about that.”
“About what? Say it.”
“Candy, I know what you do all day. Okay?”
“What do I do all day? Listen to this, dickfuck.” She stood in front of the TV, blocked my line of sight. She pointed at me and I had to look at her. “What do I do all day? I fuck men. Lots of men. I humiliate myself. I hate my life. What are you going to do about it?”
“Listen, that’s it.” My arms went up in the surrender sign. “I don’t want you to work anymore. That’s it. No more brothels, no more escort. We’re gonna detox, start a new life. That’s really it this time.”
The conversation was getting too emotional for me.
“You don’t understand, do you?” she continued. “I want to keep using. I’m sick of working, yes. But what if I want to keep using? What are you going to do about it?”
It was like I’d been cornered by a series of trick questions.
“Candy …”
I gulped. For the first time in a while I felt the fear that was rooted in my stomach, that was always there but rarely noticed, that was beginning to rise into my throat. You sensed it first as edginess, then the vague onset of a panic not yet concrete.
“Why don’t you ring Gay Blades?” she said. “You start working for once. You hock your arse.”
“Candy, you know I can’t do that. I’ll … you know, I’ll get AIDS.” It was a pathetic stab in the dark.
“No, you won’t,” she said. “You’ll use a condom, like I have to.”
“Baby, I wouldn’t know what to do. You’re heterosexual, right? So you’re just doing what you were good at anyway. Let me fuck women, no problems. If I could do it with women, I’d make us all the money, you’d never have to work, I swear.
“But look at me, Candy. Nobody would fuck me for money, I don’t think. Or not very often. Those women, they want muscle chuds, don’t they? Vogue magazine—type guys. If there was a market out there, I’d do it. But I don’t think there is. And I’d be hopeless with the gay stuff. You know that.”
“You’d learn,” she sneered. “You may not like it but you’d learn how to do it. You’d even get good at it. Then you could find out what it’s like, day in, day out. I’d love to see how you’d handle that. And how you’d feel about giving me half your money.”
I shrugged. I was trying to look impassive. I was trying to signal it was all too much.
“I’d give you half my money,” I said. “You know that. We share everything. That’s what we do. You get half of what I do in scams. It’s just that you earn more, that’s all.”
She still stood there in front of the TV with her hands on her hips. I looked at her stomach as if I could see straight through it to the screen.
“On average,” I added, shrugging.
“You’re pathetic,” she said.
It was hideous. Even through the heroin I was squirming.
“Listen, Candy, I go get the dope every day. I organize the deals. I organize the scams. Sometimes I steal books. Who got all the money from that guy’s cards? Who took all the risk in the banks? Who does most of the check stuff and card stuff? At least you can’t go to jail for working in a brothel.”
“Let’s get this straight,” she said. “If the credit card’s a woman’s name, I do it. If it’s a man’s name, you do it. It’s that simple.”
“Yeah,” I retorted, “but when you do it, it seems I help you. I come into the bank or the shop so that we look like a couple. When I do it, I do it by myself.”
We were really down to quibbling here. It was time to change tack. I sighed.
“Candy, let’s not argue. Listen, I tell you what. Okay, try this. You need to work sometimes, just sometimes, I’m saying. We need the backup money. But I’ll start putting more effort into dealing. I’ll try and push it a little so it becomes sort of full-time.”
“You can’t deal,” she said, “you always use too much. You’re hopeless.”
“Well, no I’m not,” I said. “That’s not exactly true. You wait and see. Kojak said he’d offer me a system. For every five halves I move, I get one free. So I don’t really have to cut the deals, and maybe I can get things rolling along.”
“Yeah right, we’ll see. And in the meantime?”
There was a long pause.
“You don’t have to work if you don’t want to, Candy.”
Another pause. She couldn’t believe what she heard.
“You are a cocksucking cunt, you know that?”
I was getting pissed off with the personal abuse.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Candy, get away from the TV. I’m trying to watch a show. I’m not going to talk to you if you go on like that.”
It went on and
it got more vicious. There were lulls and then the thing would charge up again. There were times when I could settle into the TV for half an hour or so, but there was a bad edge to the night. In the end we reached an agreement of sorts. We couldn’t just give up tomorrow. We both knew that. I’d give more serious dealing a shot for a few weeks. Try and get established, try and get a healthy business going. Use Kojak’s freebie system and put out the word that I would be available from nine A.M. till midnight (these were Kojak’s regular hours) each day. In the meantime Candy would keep working, so we would have lots of cash.
But if the dealing wasn’t all that successful, then in a month—we gave ourselves a time limit—we would go down to Gippsland to dry out. We had a couple of friends who lived there, a couple of hours out of Melbourne, in rich green dairy country. Peter and Michael had been on again and off again for a few years. They’d settled into a pretty stable relationship now, and a nice life down there, smoking buds and gardening and painting. Their offer had always been there—if our intentions were good, we were welcome to come down and make use of their spare room and good food and quiet lifestyle.
If that didn’t work, if we came back to Melbourne and started using, then a methadone program, we agreed, was finally around the corner. We would get on methadone for six months or twelve months, give ourselves some breathing space, some time to get our lives in order.
It was a kind of relief that there was really nowhere else for the argument to go. Nonetheless a stony silence ensued. Candy sat at the dresser fiddling with makeup and I watched TV, willing myself to be absorbed into the screen.
It was after midnight now, more than six or seven hours since I’d gotten home from meeting Little Angelo. I suggested we have a blast.
“Yeah, okay,” Candy said, “but we have to go to bed soon. I’ve got to get up for work in the morning.”
“Don’t worry, I don’t want to stay up too long.”
But of course I loved staying up on a fresh whack of heroin, even if staying up just meant sitting on the couch and nodding off. Maybe Candy just wanted the big hit and the release, the collapse into dreamless sleep. A few times a year I wanted that too. Mostly, though, I liked to fiddle, do crosswords, read, watch TV, squeeze pimples, smoke cigarettes.
I should have gone with the flow that night, but the flow through my veins was always stronger. Such divided loyalties.
We had a nice taste. Candy climbed up to the bed and tried to read for five minutes, then turned off the lamp.
“Come to bed now,” she said.
“Yeah, soon.”
I was engrossed in the late movie, The Servant, with Dirk Bogarde and James Fox. It was a very cool film, with all the British pacing and subtle rhythms that made for good smack viewing.
After fifteen minutes Candy sat up.
“I can’t get to sleep with that on. Turn it off!”
“Candy, it’s a really good movie. I’ll turn it right down, okay?”
I turned it down so that even I could barely hear it. I checked the TV guide.
“Anyway, there’s only half an hour to go.”
But she wouldn’t accept that. I watched the last half hour with a blanket draped over the TV and my head, my face six inches from the screen, the pixels of the tube making everything look abstract, the tiny hum louder than the faint dialogue. I assumed that Candy fell asleep during this time.
The movie finished. I switched the TV off and turned on the lamp beside the couch. I was still shaken by the fight, by its intensity, by the evening’s events. I had the strange but strong urge to write something just for myself, something private, to dispel the awful emotions and work out how I felt.
I got out a notebook and started writing. Tonight I had a fight with Candy. I hate that shit.
After a few minutes I heard a rustling from the bed alcove, and I knew she was sitting up again.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “I cannot fucking believe it.”
“What? I’m not making any noise!”
“The light,” she said. “The light’s keeping me awake. Turn if off and come to bed.”
I was in the middle of important thoughts, and I wanted to get them out of my head and onto the paper. It seemed at that moment the only way I had of making sense of my life.
“Five minutes, give me five minutes.”
“No!”
“All right, I’ll cover the light.”
I bent the lamp down until its cone almost touched the table. A small circle of light oozed out the sides, but the warehouse was pretty dark.
“There,” I said. “There’s more light coming in from the streetlights than this. I’ve got something to write. You can’t complain about this.”
“Arsehole,” she muttered, and rolled over.
Five minutes later it was Candy again.
“The pen. I can hear the pen rustling on the paper.”
“Oh, this is ridiculous, Candy. You’re looking for an excuse!”
“Turn the light off and come to bed.”
“I’m not even discussing it anymore.”
“Turn the light off!”
“That’s it. I’m not even talking.”
“Turn the fucking light off!”
I sat, my back to Candy, and continued writing. Candy continued to snarl at me but I remained silent and tried not to listen.
Violence can be momentarily painless when there is no warning. I felt an enormous thud on the crown of my head. Glass shattered over me and I reeled forward. The pieces of a heavy glass ashtray fell at my feet. I was a little bit confused for a couple of seconds. Then the pain signals cut in.
I reached my hands to the back of my head and cut my fingers on the chunk of glass that was lodged there. I pulled out the glass and felt a stab of pure pain. There was an explosion of blood from my head. I could feel its hot flow through my hair and down my neck. All this, in its own strange way, was less cloudy than the preceding seven hours of arguing. I was in that sweet realm where drama has a resolution in violence.
I leaned forward on the couch with my hands still holding my head. I felt the blood on my wrists and in my ears. I watched it splatter on the floor. I didn’t really feel like fainting yet, but I staggered forward onto one knee. It seemed like the thing to do.
Candy was pushing a towel into my head. She was in a panic, fingers fumbling through my hair, searching for the source of the blood, her words spilling out.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God, I’m so sorry, baby, I’m so sorry.”
There really was a lot of blood.
“I think we’d better go to the hospital,” I said, acting stoic.
She had some warm water in a bowl and was trying to sponge down my head and my face and my neck, all the while trembling and smothering my forehead with kisses and saying she was sorry over and over. I kept groaning like I was losing consciousness.
I just felt relieved to be treated so nicely. So lovingly and warmly. Things would be okay for days, maybe weeks now. I just knew it.
The words came tumbling out while she mopped me. She said she’d been so angry, she just wanted to scare me. She’d wanted the ashtray to smash near me, to show how serious she was. But it was a heavy ashtray and she was a bad aim and things had gone wrong. She’d never meant to hurt me. I believed her.
We walked up to the hospital. Candy held one arm around my shoulder and pressed the towel to my head with her other hand. By this time I actually was feeling a little wobbly. But I was buoyed by the thought that there might be some good drugs in the hospital.
As it was, the emergency room doctor was sharp. I told him I was in a considerable amount of pain. Was there any chance of some morphine? He smiled gently and looked at the size of my pupils.
“I don’t think you need any morphine,” he laughed. “I don’t think you’re in a great deal of pain.”
It was worth the try. There were no hard feelings. It was a pleasant atmosphere in the emergency room at three in the morning, everyone loving and f
riendly.
The doctor shaved a patch of my hair. He injected a local anesthetic and sewed sixteen stitches into my scalp. He gave me a strip of Panadeine Forte and a prescription for some more tomorrow.
“Go easy on these,” he said. “Not that I really expect you to.”
We walked home slowly, arm in arm through the empty fog-filled streets. We went to bed and Candy stroked my face, and we even ended up fucking softly just before dawn.
TRUTH 2: HOW IT IS
Looking at it closely, things aren’t that good, but there are cuddles, a certain comfortable feeling in the coolness of the bed, smiles, admissions of love. And this despite the constant breaking of taboos: only the guy in the hockshop; only a brothel; only to save money; only escort work; never on the street; then on the street, but only this once. The sharing of sex. The feeling of unease, unspoken. But always a condom with the others, so that things still feel all right with us, that way. And there’s some laughter into the bargain, along with the touching. Still that intimacy. The other is only work, yeah?
It’s the middle of the day, we’re sprawled on the couch, a little bit sick, watching TV and waiting for Lester or Kojak to call back. American talk shows. Anything is more interesting than fidgeting. Then without any warning, with barely a sound but the tiniest pop! the screen shuts down to blackness. And that’s how the TV dies. From now on we can hear it but we can’t see it. We will need a new one soon—a new old black-and-white one, I mean—to stop us from going crazy.
We will need a new TV to while away the time, make out nothing’s happening, make out nothing’s wrong. In the meantime, turn up the radio, reread yesterday’s paper. The form guide. Races that are already over. See how you might have done. You’re not feeling sick, that’s only queasy. Try not to feel it. You’re not feeling it. You feel all right. You’ve got integrity. Oodles left. The fucking TV’s gone.
The weather will verify all this. The morning started fine. Then it’s hot—too fucking hot. Lester calls back at last and we get on, then relax. We browse through a bookstore, I steal a book on the Vietnam War.
You lose track of time, you know what I mean? After a few weeks, listening to the TV gets frustrating. It’s a visual medium. Finally we wrangle a replacement from Victor’s cousin for fifty bucks, a set so old that the screen seems to bulge like a bubble. Summer drags on. The air is heavy, sweet, hypnotic, hazy, like musk. Aesthetic effects suffuse the screen: on The Brady Bunch you think you see Peter Fonda in the dust. For a moment you think you’re in a Holiday Inn in West Texas, and the loose screw in the ceiling fan pops every 360 degrees, beats like a heart. The endless late-night movies you watch. Abstract tragedy. Kris Kristofferson in Cisco Pike. Robert Redford and Michael J. Pollard in Little Fauss and Big Halsy. Peter Fonda with Susan George in Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry. People you never knew. Anything to avoid what’s happening: Melbourne, heroin, now.