by Louis Nowra
This didn’t faze the former Emperor of Woolloomooloo in the least. He invented the self-opening farm gate, which has never been manufactured. The development company was wound up and he started again, incurably optimistic and hardworking as at the beginning of his career. He sees things in economic cycles but ruefully acknowledges that he has always sold at the wrong time, unlike his father.
He can look back and see his successes with major developments including the Ritz Carlton (now InterContinental Sydney) in Double Bay, the SupaCenta in Moore Park, the Village Centre in Kings Cross, the Wintergarden apartments in Rose Bay, and the Reschs brewery site in south Sydney.
As he told Mandy during the launch, in a monologue as if he was addressing a potential investor, he’s now planning a revolution in retirement homes, a self-contained resort town for the over-fifty-fives with a medical centre, shops, bank, a theatre, a gym and dancing every night.
The defeat of his most personal project still rankles Sid and he tried to persuade the kids of Plunkett Street School that his vision would have been better for Woolloomooloo but was just ‘too far ahead of its time’. He saw no irony in the fact that these schoolchildren wouldn’t be there listening to him if he had had his way. Even though his dreams were destroyed, he will go to his grave still believing in his grotesque vision. He’s also happy that he still has a connection to the area, despite his loss. He is portrayed as one of the evil developers on a mural on one of the pylons supporting the railway viaduct but, as he proudly told his young listeners, ‘I have a painting of me under the railway on one of the columns on the corner of Forbes and Cathedral streets. Go and see it.’
CHEMICAL FRANK
SOME REGULARS DISAPPEAR GRADUALLY, as if their exits are in slow motion. One such was Chemical Frank, a former pharmacist. The first time I saw him I thought he was a woman. He came into the pub, slightly bent over, his long, bright white hair cut in a pageboy style, carrying a couple of plastic bags and speaking in a soft high-pitched voice. He handed out DVDs to the regulars from a plastic bag. Woolley introduced me and I realised it was a man in his late seventies.
‘Do you want any DVDs?’ he asked and handed me several. They had handwritten covers, and the titles were movies yet to be released in Australia.
‘You pirated these?’ I joked.
‘Of course, I did,’ he shot back, as if affronted by my question. ‘I’ve got a sex shop and plenty of DVD recorders.’
I handed them back and explained that, as I had written for the movies, I was against ripping off the people who had created them. He looked up at me and shook his head.
‘These people here in Woolloomooloo can’t afford to rent movies, so I give them these for free.’
‘But they can afford them,’ I protested.
‘What the fuck would you know?’ he said, giving me a wetlipped grin and continuing on his tour of the bar giving out more DVDs.
He came in a few times after that, handing out more pirated movies and rapidly downing schooners. One time he tapped me on the chest as I was talking to someone and said, ‘Glass. Glassware is the problem.’ I didn’t know what to make of the non sequitur. Another time I saw him giving white chocolate to Coco and told him it would kill her.
‘You know nothing,’ he growled. ‘Dark chocolate kills ’em, but white doesn’t.’
I thought he was daffy and this was confirmed when one afternoon he sat down at an outside table with six of us. Woolley announced that Frank had come up with a new form of Viagra. He had concocted his own ointment and the idea was to rub it on your penis to make it hard. He predicted he’d make a fortune from it. The problem was that he hadn’t tested it on anyone but himself and it had worked so well that, as he said, ‘My Chinese girlfriends will be in heaven when I get back to China.’ He asked for a volunteer. When none was forthcoming, he pointed at Jez, one of the tradies and a former model (like two other regulars).
‘You’ll do,’ he said, handing over a Vegemite jar of the ointment.
‘What, you want me to try it here?’
Frank shook his head at Jez’s stupidity. ‘No, go into the dunnies, rub it on your cock and see what happens. Then report back.’
We all laughed and Jez went to the toilets. We were still joking about it when Jez came back and sat down.
‘Didn’t work, mate.’
Frank was incredulous. ‘Get back in there and try again.’
Jez was going to say no, but we all urged him to try it again.
While he was in the toilet cubicle rubbing the ointment on his penis I asked Frank if he thought it was too messy compared to the Viagra pill.
‘This stuff makes your cock rock hard for twelve hours, the pill only does it for two.’ Someone else asked if all he’d done was just crush up Viagra pills and make an ointment out of it. ‘No,’ he said proudly, ‘it’s my own formula, I’m gonna patent it.’
I had images of Jez’s penis falling off due to this amateur concoction when he returned and sat down, again shaking his head. ‘It didn’t work.’ Frank’s baby blue eyes widened with astonishment.
‘Are you impotent or something?’
Jez shook his head. ‘In fact, Frank, my cock went the other way.’
Frank fell silent and then stood up. ‘I’m gonna test it on myself again,’ he announced and shuffled off to his apartment just down the road. He never mentioned his brainchild again. (Frank was ahead of his time. In 2016 a British company developed a Viagra gel, which gave men an erection in a third of the time of the pill. Shares in the company surged after successful trials in the laboratory.)
Mandy had rescued a puppy from a local drug dealer who had been mistreating him. Basil was a kilo of fur and bones, fleas and malnutrition and never trusted anyone but Mandy and me. When he had grown a little Frank said he wanted Basil to sit on his lap. I warned him not to, but he picked him up anyway.
‘I’m a bit of a dog whisperer,’ he said, just before Basil took a bite out of his nose. Frank’s blood was surprisingly watery and it flowed down his chin onto his white shirt.
It confirmed to me that he didn’t know what he was talking about. After he had stuffed tissues up into his bleeding nose he seemed to mentally drift for a minute or so, then returned to focus on me with urgency.
‘Glass. Glassware, Louis.’ I had no idea what he was talking about and he became frustrated. ‘Fucking scientific glassware!’ He looked at me as if I were thick. ‘See, Lou, that’s the hardest thing about this fucking business. Glassware. You can get someone to nick glassware from a laboratory but all glass used for chemistry has to be stamped with its maker’s name. Easy to trace. You’re not a glassblower, are you, Lou?’ I shook my head. ‘That’s a fucking pity,’ he sighed
Gradually I learnt more about him, but it was difficult to separate truth from fiction, and for a time I didn’t know what to believe. Born to a doctor and a pharmacist, he definitely had been a chemist, a prodigy who had sped through his course at Sydney University and had gone to Vietnam as a pharmacist, but had turned rogue. He bought up raw opium, refined it and shipped it back to Australia in cans of newsreel film. This was hard to believe, but others confirmed that during the 1970s and 1980s he had been a chemist for Kings Cross gangsters. He made huge profits for the gangs from his ability to cut cocaine. As one lawyer told me, ‘He’s a great pharmacist. He could make a kilo of cocaine stretch to 50 kilos.’ I doubted it until one day one of the tradies who used to drink at the Old Fitzroy showed me a handwritten list Frank had given him of all the prescription drugs similar to cocaine.
There was vague talk of him cooking meth for biker gangs and mysterious trips to China. He’d return with stories of shagging himself silly with Chinese women because they liked ‘old blokes’. I asked him the purpose of his visits to China.
‘I’m buying up diet pills, I’m gonna make a killing in Australia.’ I soon found out that the diet pills were the basis for making ice.
The only time I saw him angry was when he was inside the pub one wi
nter, bent over the fireplace heating up marshmallows and I teased him, saying he should be careful of the sugar or he might end up with pimples. He suddenly stood up, his marshmallow burnt, the stick smouldering, and said with great indignation, ‘I’ve never had acne in my whole life!’
He was proud of his wrinkle-free face and long white hair and seemed to have no moral qualms about what he did. There was a childlike, even Asperger’s quality to him. He was manufacturing ice, but he had no sense of the damage it caused. His former wife and two daughters had fled to England and never wanted to see him again. All his focus was on achieving purity for the drugs he made, and that meant he had to obtain perfect scientific glass for his illegal laboratory, unmarked and beautifully blown, without imperfections.
Then one day I heard he had been arrested and one of the cops searching his flat for any evidence had promised Frank he’d make sure he’d never get out of jail. I thought it was another tall story until I opened up the newspaper and read:
Detectives have seized more than 75 kilograms of a chemical they claim could have been used to manufacture more than $20 million worth of methylamphetamine … Three men, aged 32, 48 and 77, were each charged in relation to the possession of a precursor chemical. The 32-year-old man was additionally charged with an outstanding warrant. The 48-year-old man, from Blacktown, was additionally charged with fraud offences and possession of a knife in a public place. The 77-year-old man, from Woolloomooloo, was additionally charged with dealing with the proceeds of crime. They were all refused bail to face Central Local Court later today.
The reporter had made a mistake: Frank wasn’t seventy-seven, but eighty years old. What followed was weirder than fiction. He only served a few weeks in jail when he had a heart attack and was sent to the prison hospital where he had another heart attack. Or did he? He was a fabulous chemist and it was possible he had gained some pills in the prison pharmacy and had simulated heart attacks. The upshot was that he was put in a minimum security prison. Then he was caught teaching the young Lebanese prisoners how to manufacture meth. This was too much for the authorities and they released him on bail, rather than having to deal with more people making ice.
He was resigned to the fact that he’d get ten years at the trial and offered Vince and Woolley his sex shop to run. During the court case he played the befuddled, deaf old man perfectly. The judge was a woman and he kept calling out to her, ‘Honey, I can’t hear a thing!’ She constantly warned him not to call her ‘Honey’ but he paid no attention.
The police had made a crucial error. Much to their chagrin Frank was freed because there was nothing illegal about importing diet pills from China, even though they could be used to make meth. When the not guilty verdict came in, Frank stood up and thanked ‘Honey’. That night he went to the Cross, bought some ecstasy and whisky and downed them all in a celebratory hurry. The result was that his friends thought he was dying and he was rushed to St Vincent’s Hospital.
One of the first things he did the next day was to come to the Old Fitzroy for another celebratory drink. When he arrived the regulars gave him a standing ovation, which he accepted with his usual shy, endearing smile. He had a bright new scar on his forehead, not from police beatings as we first suspected, but from keeling over as a result of drinking whisky for the first time in weeks.
He had no money so I bought him a beer and in return he offered to write me a list of prescription drugs that contained cocaine. When I said I didn’t want it, he shook his head and said with a knowing smile, ‘Mark my words, Lou, you’ll want that list in the future.’
Then things became murky and genuinely weird. He was kidnapped twice. He was fought over by a bikie outfit and a Lebanese mob. Now that he had narrowly avoided jail he was a free man and, as the gangs recognised, probably the best meth chemist in Sydney.
Realising that the Lebs were after Frank, a biker gang decided to safeguard their investment. Three bikies shifted into the Frisco Hotel, near Frank’s flat. They took it in turns to protect him and prevent him being kidnapped. All he had to do was manufacture ice. His demands were simple: he wanted to live at home but have a bolthole where he could make the stuff, which meant he needed unmarked glassware to obtain the purity he was aiming for.
One of his guardians had an obsessive-compulsive disorder and spent much of his time doing Frank’s laundry and cleaning his flat. As Woolley said, with considerable admiration, ‘He looks like the most fucking rough character you could ever see, but he keeps a meticulously clean place.’ Another time Woolley went to see Frank and found him naked in his bath while the gangster with the cleaning fetish rubbed a pumice stone over Frank’s arms and legs.
There finally came a time when Frank was on his own. As he walked down a Woolloomooloo Street a car pulled up and he was bundled inside and driven away. Realising the old man was physically fragile, and needed looking after if he were to help them, the Lebanese gang lovingly cared for him as they hunted down the long list of the equipment he needed.
A month or so later Frank turned up at the Old Fitzroy. He’d put on weight. Somehow he had been rescued by the bikers and he was ecstatic about it. The Lebanese had refused him alcohol and, thinking he was too skinny, had forced him to eat.
‘I fucking hate falafels and Leb food,’ he complained. ‘And I don’t like being fucking fat.’
But what became clear when he tried to get cash out of his bank account was that a batty Frank had given his Lebanese bodyguards his PIN number and they had cleaned out all the money.
The bikers came up with a new plan. They’d give their chemist $1000 a week to keep him happy so that he could buy the expensive bottles of whisky he preferred but this time his bodyguards would live with their prized chemist in his tiny apartment. They chose two tough bikie chicks to scare away any potential kidnappers. ‘They were more trouble than they were worth,’ he was to say after the ordeal. They ingested all of his drugs, including his morphine and Oxy, and when they had taken those they forced Frank to reveal his hidden stashes of other drugs. He was relieved when they left, their brains scrambled, their bodies racked by toxic chemicals.
Gradually the Lebanese gang lost interest in Frank. He seemed to becoming more vague and testier about using the proper glassware. The bikers wouldn’t give up on him, though, and one night he was kidnapped again on his way home from the Old Fitzroy. It didn’t take the bikers long to realise he had dementia and they threw him out of their moving car. An ambulance took him to St Vincent’s, where he had become a regular.
Weeks later I arrived at the Old Fitzroy for lunch and saw Frank, wearing a white hospital gown, step out of a car outside the pub, and thank the driver and his passenger for the lift. He had a black eye from falling down drunk the previous night and a plastic identification bracelet on his wrist, having escaped from the hospital. Outside the Jewish Museum in Darlinghurst Road he’d run into the ‘nice gay couple’ who had given him a lift to the pub. Now he was going to have a beer and wait for Woolley, whom he was beginning to depend on.
One evening I arrived to see him drinking a beer and being cared for by Woolley. Frank’s pristine white hair, of which he was so proud, had turned yellow. He chatted aimlessly, as if lost in a mental fog. I wondered if his heavy drinking was taking its toll. He had been in and out of hospital for months because of it.
‘Oh, who cares,’ he said. ‘I’m fucking eighty-three.’ Then he perked up and grinned. ‘What a great day I’ve had,’ he said, pulling a wad of dollars out of his pocket. ‘A thousand right here.’ Earlier that day he had been invited to a university chemistry department to give some shady post-grad chemists advice on how to make synthetic cocaine. ‘I liked the glassware,’ he said, almost drooling at the memory of it. Frank shook his head at their incompetence. ‘But the spastics hardly knew anything. They said I was old school. The nongs had no concept of the purity that would be involved.’ He pulled out some crumpled pages on which were written chemical formulae. ‘They didn’t know I had this,’ he smiled
slyly, then his eyes dulled and his expression became distant, as if he were peering into another world.
From this point, the more I saw of him, the more it seemed as if his personality was being rubbed away by time. He became easily disorientated and more confounded by daily tasks. His watch had stopped at nine, so to him it was always that time, and he’d ring up Woolley at 3 a.m. asking him to buy him alcohol before the bottle shop closed.
As usual, Woolley, who has helped many an old man afflicted by signs of dementia, organised Frank’s daily routine and helped arrange a carer for him. The one they chose was an ex-boxer and Ayesha was against it.
‘He won’t be right for Frank,’ she prophesied, and she was right. The carer, who was still grief stricken about the death of his father, had a nervous breakdown.
There were many meetings to decide Frank’s fate. Social workers, psychologists and carers met with him and went through a series of questions to determine just how compos mentis he really was. These meetings were often frustrated by either the old man’s non-appearance due to another alcohol-induced stay at St Vincent’s or someone’s unavailability. Eventually all of them turned up and Frank dealt brilliantly with their questions and rattled on about esoteric chemical formulae and wrote out pages of them to impress his interrogators. Then he was asked a final question, one that is generally the litmus test of encroaching dementia. ‘What day is this, Frank?’
His blank stare was the answer and soon he was in a nursing home. Woolley visits him, but Frank now lives in a world of ghosts and fantasies of escape. Getting out of the home seems easy, but just what bus does he take in order to get back to Woolloomooloo and the Old Fitzroy?
BOURKE AND PALMER STREETS
PALMER STREET RUNS PARALLEL TO BOURKE, but really it doesn’t exist any more; it was transformed into an expressway funnelling traffic into the Harbour Tunnel. In a way it is like the twin who died, while Bourke, the living one, is reminded of the other’s phantom existence by the constant dull throb of speeding cars and trucks, leaving in their wake a vaporous trail of petrol fumes that drift across the streets.