I Am The Local Atheist

by Warwick Stubbs

  “So you wanna do a night out on the town?”

  “Sure man, I could do with a break myself I guess.”

  “Cool. We should meet up at the Frat maybe.”

  “Cool. Meet you there at 8ish?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  The Fraterniser supplied us with drinks. Some pretty expensive drinks. And neither of us got close to being drunk, but both our wallets had still managed to suffer damage from the prices.

  At that point, we were still too sober to make any suggestive eye contact with any of the females in the room, so we decided to walk the streets instead. This became a pretty depressing case of ‘why did we bother to go out in the first place’ after seeing bars half-empty and the occasional night-club blasting out techno beats in an attempt to sound busy and exciting, but not even the bouncers on the doors could convince us that this was the actual case – their bored looks confirmed our diverging trajectories. Neither of us could honestly say that we were willing to spend an extra five bucks to get on a dance floor where pink and yellow lights circled the area as two females dressed in skimpy dresses danced to the sound of high pitched break beats while their potential one night stands goggled them with far drunker but more confident and alluring eyes. Man I hated the night life. I’d stare at the vomit stains on the footpath, wrappers in the gutter, beer bottles casually snuck behind doors or just smashed against walls and almost ache to be back in my room staring at the screen of my computer involving myself in a far more challenging pursuit. I had wanted a break from work, but this wasn’t it.

  No money, no beer, no drunk, no fun, no girls.

  11:45 p.m.

  Bored in Invercargill.

  Hanging around the front of a 24/7 watching people get drunker, more abusive and staggering from one pub to another.

  “Hey – Yous smoke?”

  Lucas flicked out a cigarette for the man who had separated from his two friends by the crossing to come over and talk to us. He laughed as Lucas pushed the box towards him. “Na, na – You know where to get happy time?”

  What the fuck? I looked at the guy a little confused. “I’m not into pills, sorry.”

  “Na, na – smoke? Eh?” He leaned over my shoulder. “I’s smell it. It good, no?” He stepped back nodding and winking. The two other men were now standing by him smiling some very cheesy smiles.

  I turned my head and lifted the shoulder of my shirt up to smell it. Shit, it actually smelt like pot. This guy had Class-C sniffer dog senses! “Umm, yeah, I could probably get you some if you want.”

  “Weez like that much.”

  “Okay.” Suddenly my night out on the town didn’t seem so boring. “Look, I’ll tell you what. I have to go and get it first okay?”

  “Yeah man.”

  “But it’s going to cost you thirty dollars for a tinny.”

  “Sure dude. It good?”

  “It’s the best.” That was highly debatable, but if there was one thing I had learnt from Tinsdale, it was that y’ gotta sell yourself as the best anyway otherwise the deal might not go through. “Alright,” I said turning to Lucas. “Do you wanna hang with these guys?”

  “Not really. I’ll come with you.”

  That wasn’t the right answer. He was supposed to stay with them and txt me as soon as he thought it might turn into a bad deal, like if they were undercover cops or something, giving me the heads up and taking off himself, but I hadn’t had time to consider the fact that Lucas had probably never done a deal before. “Okay.” I paused, not knowing what else to say. I turned back to the gentlemen. “You guys wanna hang here until we get back?”

  “Yeah, that good. See you soon.”

  “Right.”

  Lucas and I drove back to my place. I went to the wooden pencil case beside my bed, slid the lid open and took out the bag, sizing it up – quite happy that there would still be a hefty quarter ounce or so left after the operation – extracted just over a gram, put the rest of the bag back in the pencil case, and began rolling a tinny in some tinfoil I had lying around.

  “You look pretty skilled in the art of rolling.”

  “I’m not a seller – it’s not something that I … agree with, particularly. But I’m too bored to question my own standards. I’ve just seen it done a lot. And anyway, it’s not like rolling a fag – I can’t do that for shit. Tried and failed.”

  He waited patiently, looking about my room. I was glad my bible was lying in the bottom of my rubbish bin where I had dumped it with a mighty heft after the youth group had been taken away from me. It was hidden under a massively overflowing pile of scrunched up pieces of paper.

  “You like that band?” He was looking up at the poster of Ecclesiastic Seal.

  “No, not really.”

  “Oh.”

  “I knew someone once who liked them. They gave the poster to me.”

  “And you stuck it up on the ceiling.”

  “They stuck it up on the ceiling. I just can’t be bothered taking it down.”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t mind listening to the music, just not a fan, that’s all.”

  He grunted. “You like Christian music?”

  He was definitely prying. I looked over at the rubbish bin with its year’s worth of overflowing balls of paper. “I like music. Some of it verges on being Christian, some of it verges on not being Christian, some of it is and some of it isn’t. You can’t tell me that you don’t like all music that contains Christian themes or lyrics.”

  “Sure I can. I have no interest in listening to Christian music. It’s just the same shit over and over.”

  “You like Black Sabbath?”

  “Yeah, man, who doesn’t. But they ain’t a Christian band.”

  “That they may not be, but read the lyrics to ‘After Forever’ and you’ll see that even they were willing to pursue Christian themes in their music.” I looked at him with raised eyebrows as I twisted the last end of the tinny. “There are other songs as well, including the classic ‘War Pigs’. I mean, fuck, I’m not gonna stop listening to Led Zeppelin because some of the songs they covered, like ‘In My Time of Dying,’ contained Christian lyrics. I’m not saying that it’s Christian music per se, I’m just saying that I don’t care what kind of music it is – it could be openly devil worshipping music – but if it’s catchy, I’m probably gonna listen to it. I mean, I can’t stand Classical music, but if I hear something by Beethoven that I like, then it’s not like I won’t listen to it just because it falls under the umbrella of ‘Classical music’.”

  “Guess not.”

  “Right then,” I said feeling pretty stoked with myself for exposing such a weak one-sided point-of-view out of Lucas… Him, not me, this time! “Let’s go do some drug dealing!”

  I pushed the tinny into my wallet as we made our way back to the car.

  We arrived at the corner of the 2-4 with the men nowhere in site. I looked all around us, over the road, even walking out onto the road a little as dickheads drove past yelling drunken abuse. I looked up and down the main street but couldn’t see a group of three men anywhere. “Shit, where did they go?”

  I went back to where Lucas was standing and suggested we walk around the block.

  We walked down the street past the picture theatre, turning left at the corner and spotting, what looked to me like, a hot-dog vending van on the side of the road with our three men standing in front of it conversing with people inside who we couldn’t see. “Never seen that hot-dog stand before.”

  “It’s not a hot-dog stand” Lucas said as we got closer. “It’s The Salvation Army doing their Friday night rounds offering food to the drunken and disorderly to try to sober them up and keep them out of trouble.”

  I stopped immediately. “Are you serious?”

  He halted as I inched closer to some parked cars on the side of the road.

  “Yeah, man. They go out every Friday to try to prevent alcohol abuse by offering free food to people who need to sober up.”


  “Oh,” I said, a little concerned about what I had on me. I reached an arm out to pull him back behind a parked car with me. “This would look real bad if we were seen dealing drugs in front of The Salvation Army.”

  He looked at me not really getting what I meant, then caught a whiff of it and clicked. “Oh! Yeah, true.”

  We positioned ourselves behind the cars in a semi crouched manner. I kept a vigilant eye behind me and over the road in case any cop cars rolled by and spotted us looking highly suspicious.

  “Do you think there’s anyone in the van that you know?”

  “Probably. I’ve kinda got to know a few more than just Alice and Christie. It’s probably a good bet that Alice is in there though.”

  “Hmmm, I wonder if we can get the guys’ attention without anyone else noticing.”

  “Yeah that would be good. Want me to try waving my arms a bit, just enough for them to see but not the people in the van?”

  “Yeah, we could try that.”

  He did, looking pretty stupid, but it worked. They spotted us, yelled out “Hey friends!” with Lucas drastically giving signals to ‘hush’ and ‘come over this way’ before they finally made some goodbye sounds to whoever was in the van and headed toward us laughing.

  “Guys! How you do?”

  “Yeah sweet man, come around the corner with us.”

  We led them across the road and around the other side of a building where it was dark and shady and not too obvious. I showed them the tinnies, they showed me the money; the deal went down and everyone was happy.

  I declined to join them in a puff, but I waited for them to exhale smoke into the cold air above and agree that it was good shit before nodding to Lucas as we parted ways with their happy smiling faces.

  “Y’ gotta hang about and show them good will, so they don’t think you’re ripping them off.”

  “Were you ripping them off?”

  “Thirty dollars is pretty expensive for a tinny, especially for pot of that quality. I tried to stick a bit more than a gram in, though to make up for it.”

  “Right.”

  I wasn’t sure if Lucas was impressed or just highly interested in the whole situation. He had seemed to keep an observer’s distance throughout. Either way, I’d earned an extra thirty bucks – probably only an extra five to compensate the twenty-five worth being taken from my own stash, but that plus the several fives we hadn’t spent entering shitty clubs, plus the money not spent on alcohol in those same clubs, meant that all up I probably saved myself fifty odd dollars.

  … minus the twenty-five spent at The Fraterniser at the start of the night, meant that I probably only broke even by doing the drug-deal. Damn it. That lowered my enthusiasm.

  We were pretty much heading back to the car without even thinking about it when The Salvation Army’s food-van drove by with Christie hanging her head out of the side panel waving her hands and crying out “Hey friends!”

  “Probably Alice huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  But Lucas actually looked like he was about to break out into a smile. He was already breaking out into a quick walk as the van pulled up ahead of us.

  The back door of the van opened and two other officers piled out and set up a water dispenser outside. Lucas introduced me to them but I forgot their names almost straight away. Christie was perched behind the open panel on the side of the van with a tray extended out in front of that contained lots of buns and scones.

  “What are you boys doing out on a chilly night like this?”

  Lucas leaned on the side of the van looking up at her. “Shouldn’t we be asking you the same thing?”

  “Well, I have a mission, to help those in need.”

  “When you could be at home sitting by a warm fire sipping tea with your feet up?”

  Christie grinned. “Well, I’m sure that’s exactly what Alice is doing right now. I know it’s certainly something similar to what I might be doing if it wasn’t my turn on the van.”

  “And what would this something similar be then?”

  “Well, it would probably involve coffee instead of tea, and probably lots of popcorn and girlie movies.”

  A groan sounded out from the men.

  I looked about us, but there didn’t seem to be all that many people in need. “Who are these people in need?”

  One of the men turned to me and said “drunks!”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Bloody idiots who don’t know what’s good for them.”

  “Okay.”

  He put his hands on his hips. “Y’ know? They could be at home looking after themselves, or at least having just one or two drinks and leave it at that and still have a good time. I just don’t get the attitude of these people.”

  Christie looked at him with some sympathy. “Are you telling me that when you were a young teenager that you didn’t go out on the town and get blindly drunk thinking that it was all fun and games?”

  He turned away, shaking his head. “I paid the price Christie, I paid the price. I just wish these kids… I just wish…” He looked about him as the other man put a hand on his shoulder. “Shit, I’m sorry. I just wish there was some other way to help.”

  His friend said to him “We’re doing what we can. And you are making a difference. God has seen to that.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  We were standing near a nightclub. The two officers went over to talk to the bouncers.

  Lucas looked up at Christie perched in behind the opening. “Is that why you do it?”

  “Why?”

  “Because of drunks?”

  Christie shrugged her shoulders. “Sure.” But she didn’t sound very convincing. “I do it because it helps. That’s pretty important to me.”

  There was a commotion at the doors of the nightclub nearby. A group of three girls came stumbling out into the arms of the officers as they tried to direct them towards the van. Some swearing came from the girl in front as she stumbled closer to us and I recognised her as Claire; and then Wendy following behind trying to catch up; and then Lisa smiling happily as the drunker two reached some steps at the door of a shop near the van and sat down laughing.

  The officers rallied themselves by the water dispenser filling cups of water for the girls as Lisa made her way over to me.

  “Hey David. How’s it going?”

  “Sweet as Lisa. Out on the town?”

  “Yeah, just hanging and having fun. What you guys up to?”

  There was a splash and Claire’s voice cried out “I don’t need water you faggot!” Wendy was on her side laughing as the officers tried to encourage her to have a drink.

  I looked at Lisa. “Been drinking?”

  “Just a little” she said with a big smile.

  “Feel good?”

  “Yeah man!”

  Christie offered Lisa some food to pass to her friends but Claire wasn’t having any of it. “Fuck off trying to sober me!” She screamed at the top of her voice. “Arghhhh! I love being drunk! Fuck you all!”

  Lucas took the outstretched buns from Lisa’s helpless hands, said “thanks – I’ll take those,” and started nibbling on one himself. “My name’s Lucas, by the way.”

  “Lisa.”

  “Oh,” he said, nodding and chewing at the same time.

  Wendy looked like she was half way between laughing and vomiting.

  Lisa turned to me and said “Hey, can I talk to you for a moment?”

  “Sure.” Though I didn’t want her to – it was embarrassing enough being seen there with her friends.

  We moved a few steps away from the others as Lucas nibbled and chatted with Christie, who seemed generally more interested in him than the two people the officers were trying to help.

  “I got some more information” Lisa said.

  “Okay.”

  “But it’s not much.”

  “It’s something.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Every bit counts eh?”


  “Sure.”

  “Turns out…” she whispered the name “Claire knows this guy who knows Delbo.”

  “Huh!” I said. “Looks like I’m not the only one you know with drug connections after all.”

  Lisa rolled her eyes. “I guess not.”

  I smirked.

  “Yeah okay,” Lisa said. “I guess I’ve spent more time with Wendy and didn’t really pay as much attention to Claire. I just got wrapped up in the fun that I was having with both of them.”

  Like using some deity as an excuse to wreck vengeance on other people.

  “So what’s the deal with this guy?”

  “Apparently he’s been in and out of trouble a lot and has spent time at that place where those kinds of guys go when they are released from bail, or when people just don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  I looked over at Christie and Lucas as they flirted with each other, completely oblivious to the trouble the men were having with the drunk girls, and said quietly “The Men’s Hostel?”

  “Yeah, Claire said it has something to do with these guys.” She chucked her thumb in the truck’s direction.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Rucker, I think.”

  The name sent a chill down my spine. He was one of Tinsdale’s mates, and probably the most dodgy and dishonourable of any of them. I could get along with most of Tinsdale’s friends and was happy to let them take the piss out of me while having the occasional beer with them, but Rucker was like a weasel infesting the air with his shifty eyes. Whenever he turned up at the door, I headed for my bedroom. And quickly.

  “What did Rucker have to say?”

  “Claire said that he said that Serene had gone back to Delbo’s that same night for another joint.”

  “Was Rucker there that night?”

  “Yeah. She bought a spliff or something – it was basically tobacco with a little bit of weed in it – and then he got her drunk…”

  “Delbo got her drunk?”

  “No, Rucker. I don’t think Delbo wanted anything more to do with her after selling her the spliff.”

  For the first time since she had started questioning me about this, I wanted to know more. “Why’d he get her drunk?”