The Feel-Good Hit of the Year

by Liam Pieper

  Throughout the early years of high school, when not in uniform, I wore the same thing every day: a black denim jacket over a white T-shirt with black tracksuit pants. It was shapeless and baggy, which I thought hid the fact that I was as well. Short and dumpy, I could arrange the folds of denim and polyester to preclude any hint as to what my body might look like. At thirteen I imagined the ensemble to be quite stylish, like a relaxed tuxedo – something James Bond might slip into in a post-coital languor while he searched for his cigarettes – but were someone to wear that same outfit on school premises past the age of consent, they would end up on a government watch list pretty sharpish. My skin was fighting a losing battle against grotesque, infected pimples that would pop up and refuse to leave until I squeezed them into scars. I wore my hair in a long, greasy ponytail, and I can’t imagine I smelt very nice. In short, I was a catch.

  I passed my lunchtimes reading or hanging out with the twitchy outcasts who had annexed the foursquare court and swapped tips on hacking PlayStations and bomb making. Now and then I got detention, which I enjoyed because it gave me an excuse to read for an hour without having to talk to anyone.

  Then, one day during my fourteenth year, things changed. A group of kids I vaguely knew invited me to smoke weed with them. They were musicians. Not the fun kind, mind. Not the kind with cool haircuts and guitars and smack habits and girlfriends; these were jazz musicians. It was still better, though, than hanging around with the kids at school who spoke Elvish. The jazz musicians asked if I knew where they could score some grass. I told them I’d be happy to help.

  There was always weed around the house, down the back of the couch, spilling out of an open baggie on the kitchen table or stowed away in my parents’  filing cabinet, the lock of which I could pick with a pen lid. I stole a chunk and went to hang out with my new buddies, Ben, Marco and Jules, determined to buy their friendship with it.

  Ben’s dad was away on business and we stood in his backyard, rolling joint after joint. His house was warm and comfortable and he had pay TV. I remember walking inside from the backyard to catch the tail end of an episode of Ren & Stimpy and laughing so hard I thought my heart would stop. I remember how much fun I had scoffing pizza and listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon on Ben’s dad’s huge stereo speakers, letting the twin channels blow my tiny mind. That you could have fun smoking pot was a revelation; it was a world away from the furtive paranoia of smoking cones out of Sam’s bedroom window.

  Catching the train home the next day, I felt dazed and hung-over, but, as I sat on the platform, I could feel the loneliness that had spread over me since childhood burn off like a morning fog. My winning combination of shyness and snobbery had made me solitary, and spending the night smoking and laughing with acerbic, witty kids my own age was a turning point. They seemed ridiculously cool; they knew music and books and the phone numbers of girls I was too timid to talk to. On top of all that, they’d insisted on paying me for the weed, and as I jumped on the train I was clutching a blushing-red $20 note.

  Word got around, and classmates started calling me up to ask for weed. At first I would trade it for booze. I had made a friend, Dave, the son of a hard-drinking supermarket manager, who would exchange vodka or whisky from his parents’ liquor cabinet for buds that I nicked from Mum and handed over to him raw, covered in lint from the pockets of my tracksuit.

  Then I started to get hit up for grams by older kids at school, then by people outside of school, then by the wider neighbourhood. One magical day, Lilly, my eternal unrequited love, called me and asked me to meet her by the swings with a gram, which was as close to romance as I’d ever come. I was happy to oblige as I didn’t think selling a little pot was a big deal.

  It’s easy to follow my logic. I’d grown up surrounded by those who’d smoked pot, which is illegal, and they all seemed like good people. Ergo, the laws that say you can’t smoke pot don’t make sense. And if those laws are bullshit, what other laws are bullshit? So I didn’t have any kind of moral objection to helping people to score weed while I made a buck off it. If anything pedalling my pushbike out to meet some paranoid stranger in a bong-stinking bungalow made me feel grown-up and sophisticated. It seemed to me that what I was doing was a far less serious enterprise than my new clients thought. My new role as purveyor of illegal drugs seemed as innocuous a chore to me as picking up a paper round.

  At first I stole a little at a time from my parents’ stash, then, after Ardian got busted doing the same thing and was grounded, I started buying in bulk from a local dealer.

  Marco had introduced me to Jimmy the Builder, an affable Turkish carpenter who made ends meet by wholesaling drugs. He was kindly and brash and never discreet, cruising around the suburbs in a specially imported Lexus while wearing work-dirty overalls. The police knew what he was up to but could never manage to catch him in the act. Every couple of days he would get pulled over by an unmarked car and would wait patiently while the cops ran their gloved fingers over his upholstery. He carried his stash, a bulging plastic bag of pills and dope, down the front of his jocks. One time a cop pointed at his groin and asked him to explain the bulge.

  ‘Hey,’ he grinned at her, grabbing at it, ‘I’m Turkish!’

  Jimmy would meet me out the back of the 7-Eleven, drive me around the block in his Lexus and then sell me an ounce of weed for $300. I’d take that home and divide it into grams by sight, like a pizza maker measuring dough, so that I had twenty-eight little even buds, all in a row. I’d then wrap these up in foil and hide them in my bedroom. It took me about a fortnight to clear an ounce bag, selling each gram for $25. That made me $700, or a clear profit of $400, or 133 per cent of my initial investment. I’d never really had spending money before, and it was odd to have so much of it all of a sudden. I would count it out on my bed and look at the squirrelly pile of loose notes in wonder.

  The cash didn’t come easily, though. I got out of school at 3.10 p.m., went home to eat and change, and then I would be on the road, pumping the pedals on my BMX from four until late at night, making deliveries. I always made sure that I met clients at their places. Deals on the street made me nervous and when I had the chance to see how someone lived, it was easier to judge what kind of person they were: whether a client was just socially awkward or if they were visually measuring me as a fit for the chains in their dungeon.

  There were very few bad scenes, all things considered. There was one time when a local gangster and semi-professional boxer thought I had ratted him out to the cops and took me for a ride in his car with a bunch of heavies. Another time, during one of those droughts when there was hardly any product to be found on the street, I followed a dodgy contact to Camberwell, into a room full of Cambodian smack dealers with sharpened machetes who stared me down and muttered in Khmer. I bought my bag of weed and did my best to smile as broadly as possible while still looking small and inoffensive, with lots of pleases and thank-yous, like a tourist trying to order coffee in Paris.

  I started to move more and more weed. At first I took orders on the house phone. As I began to get calls from strangers in the middle of the night asking for product, I worried that my folks would find out what I was up to, so I bought myself a little Nokia prepaid mobile.

  It’s a cosmopolitan industry, really. People buy drugs for all kinds of reasons: for recreation, out of habit, as self-medication for trauma or mental illness. Loneliness was the kicker for a lot of my clients. There were the very ill, the very awkward, young divorcees and the like, who took drugs to forget their loneliness. Some bought them just for the human contact. Those housebound with a disability or agoraphobia, or who were alone in a new city, might call a dealer over, like a pizza boy, just to have a visitor for a while.

  I understood this motivation; I appreciated the contact too. Often I would stay late, chatting with clients, sharing bowls of weed or packets of Twisties. The client–dealer relationship is confidential by nature and the minute I sat down many of my clients would unleash
long stream-of-consciousness confessions, telling me their secrets and fears and jealousies, heart-rending, scandalous gossip about people I would never meet. It happened more often than you’d expect, apropos of nothing, this intense, one-sided intimacy. Maybe because I’d be meeting someone with the explicit purpose of trading contraband, I passed a certain threshold of privacy that encouraged people to load me up with baggage before sending me out the door: well-hidden hatred for their mum, frustrations with their partner. Perhaps mine was just a familiar but peripheral face obliged to sit through a half-hour of polite chatter, like a hairdresser’s.

  They told me about their sex lives, their problems at work, if they were contemplating divorce or violence or suicide. I got the feeling that in most cases I was far enough removed from their real lives that they could confide things to me they wouldn’t tell anyone else. One client, the floor manager of a call centre, had dumped his girlfriend years ago but couldn’t get over her.

  ‘I know I shouldn’t have done it, man,’ he told me, of the time he got drunk and rode his motorbike to her place to confront her new boyfriend. ‘I suppose he’s a nice guy. I can see it from his point of view. If I was still with her and some ex turned up drunk in the middle of the night, I’d be upset. So I left. But as I was leaving I saw her favourite G-string lying in the middle of the hallway. When we were together, I used to get mad at her for leaving her shit everywhere but when I saw that G-string, I just got sad. Like, he’s in there now, you know? And I got on my motorbike and I was going across the West Gate Bridge, and I stopped, and thought, What if I just jumped? ’

  He looked up at me for a reaction, his eyes as wide and guileless as a teddy bear’s. It was a moment, the cri de coeur of a very unhappy man. I was fourteen, and also stupendously high, so not the best confidant.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, not entirely convincingly. ‘Don’t kill yourself. But if you do, can I have your bike? I mean, you aren’t going to need it.’

  One day he stopped calling me, which means he worked it out, one way or the other.

  Running drugs got me out of the house, away from my books and my morose records. Going to party after party to make deliveries forced me to come out of my shell, and, oddly, encouraged me to smoke less weed. I started to consider myself a professional and so restricted my own smoking to when I was hanging out with friends. I wanted to stay on the ball in case things went badly.

  Towards the end of the year, just as the seemingly endless Melbourne winter was starting to break, I went to a party with some older kids, where Jules and Marco knew some musicians. We were standing against a wall, flowering, sipping beers. An older girl I recognised from school came up – tall and thin with the lank, matted post–Rage Against the Machine dreadlocks that girls wore back then. She was wearing a too-tight bra that showed through a threadbare band T-shirt. I stared at her breasts, then, when she caught me, at the ground, stricken.

  ‘I know youse,’ she said. ‘You guys are musos!’

  Jules nodded, and Marco smiled and bantered, dropping jokes and names with easy, bleary-eyed charm while I stood by, taking notes.

  ‘I like you guys. You guys are cool.’ She smiled, and then pointed at me.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Are you cool? You’re just kind of standing there.’

  I wet my lips and let out a little squeak. Jules stepped in.

  ‘This is Liam. Do you know Liam? He’s a dealer.’

  She turned over this information with the easy professionalism of a dad flipping a sausage on a barbecue. ‘Cool.’

  I liked the sound of that, especially coming from a pretty girl who’d never have noticed me otherwise. ‘Yes,’ I told her, ‘I’m a dealer. Would you like my number?’

  6

  There was a double standard in play when it came to drug dealers in our house. Mum and Dad had no problem with my smoking weed, provided I did my chores, and would share spliffs with us older children on special occasions, but they were sniffy about the act of selling pot.

  Actually, they were surprisingly uncool about it all when they found out I’d been selling weed. They liked smoking pot, yes, and mushrooms got a pass, but they were stridently anti-drugs otherwise, except for acid, of course, but only on holidays. I can distinctly recall a family holiday to Sydney, when Dad had booked us a hotel in Kings Cross and was outraged to find it full of junkies once we’d arrived. They were particularly disappointed, then, one school night when I was in Year 9 when a junkie knocked on the door, looking for me.

  The family was sitting around the lounge room, watching a documentary on fractal art. We were, like the brownies we’d been eating all afternoon, deliciously toasted. Hamish, who at age ten was too young for hash cake, was playing with Lego on the carpet. One of Ardian’s friends had just harvested a summer crop and supplied us with a bag of weed leaf, which we’d spent the afternoon baking.

  When a crop is harvested, the buds, sticky with THC-rich resin, are stored and sold, but the remaining garbage bags full of leaf, comparatively low in psychoactives, are either given away or sold for next to nothing, as with bones at a butcher’s. There is very little THC in the leaf of the plant, but it can be teased out through slow cooking in margarine. It’s a very thrifty way to use weed. The memory of the Potato Famine runs in our veins and if we were given a bag of terrible weed leaf then, by God, we were going to get high with it.

  Hash brownies have a way of sneaking up on you. You don’t realise how strong they are until it’s too late. You’ll munch a couple and then an hour later, thinking they haven’t worked, you’ll be halfway through a third when you’ll start to feel a mellow lull creep up your bones, and you’ll just have time to think, Oh no!, when suddenly you’ll be able to see through time. We were sitting around, waiting for the brownies to kick in, fidgeting throughout Neighbours. Towards the end of The Simpsons, my mum started kneading her eye sockets with her knuckles and announced, ‘Oh, wow. I never realised my eyeballs were so round. Do you think that’s why they call them eyeballs? Hey, Liam, feel my eyes.’  We were ready for the movie.

  Ardian had sourced a documentary from someone at uni that showed how scientists were using computer modelling to produce visual representations of chaos mathematics, interspersed with spinning CGI images of fractal equations being calculated. The film showed the psychedelic fields of numbers, plotted in colour, as weird, organic shapes flowering ever outwards, recurring again and again, before the ubiquitous shape of the Buddha would appear. All the while, a soothing voice-over explained how maths, art, science and the natural world were one and the universe was infinitely recursive and magical. For a couple of gentrifying hippies and their kids, this was a pretty big day.

  Afterwards, we sat in stoned appreciation of the beauty of the world, the intrinsic interconnectivity of all matter, energy and consciousness, eating packet after packet of Tim Tams. Together we wandered through the house, giggling and bumping into tables as we spotted the fractal art that played out everywhere around us. Ardian ambled over to the hall near the front door, where one of Mum’s artworks was hanging. ‘Look here!’ he said, in his thoughtful, gentle way. ‘They’re all through this picture.’  We crammed into the hallway to admire the loops and swirls of Mum’s artwork, which we now realised had been obviously governed by some divine higher universal truth, when the doorbell rang.

  We all jumped and looked at each other, unsure of what to do. None of us was fond of police and a knock at the door this late at night was never good news. Eventually Dad opened the door. A stranger was on the doorstep, medium height, mid twenties. ‘Hi!’ he said to Dad. ‘Can I buy some weed off you?’

  Dad was quiet for a beat, and then answered slowly, with exaggerated confusion. ‘What?’

  ‘Weed.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Dad unconvincingly.

  ‘Weed,’ the stranger said, then again, louder, slower and with more careful diction, like an American in an airport. ‘Grams. I want to buy some pot off yo
u.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you,’ my dad said, before starting to close the door. My heart started to slide back down my throat, when an idea struck the stranger. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I must have the wrong place. Are you Liam? I wanted to buy some weed off Liam.’

  Dad stopped closing the door and turned to look at me. There was a long, excruciating silence as the stranger walked inside, pushing past Dad to shake my hand.

  ‘You must be Liam! Hope you don’t mind. Your mobile was off so I thought I’d just knock on the door. Can I buy a quarter?’

  ‘I can’t help you,’ I choked out.

  He looked confused. ‘But everyone said you could.’

  ‘They were wrong.’ I took the stranger by the arm and walked him to the door. ‘I don’t sell weed. I’m very sorry.’ I started to close the door and gave him just enough time to yell out, ‘What about pills?’

  I turned back around. Mum and Dad were angry. Ardian was grinning mirthfully. I was in trouble.

  There was some yelling, then some pleading, and then finally my parents sat me down for a talk. Mum spoke while Dad furiously rolled and then smoked a joint, too angry to talk, and I tried to reason my way out of this mess.

  ‘We don’t want our child to be a drug dealer,’ said Mum.

  ‘Some of your best friends are drug dealers.’

  ‘Those aren’t our friends. Those are our drug dealers.’

  ‘They’re friendly.’

  ‘But they aren’t friends,’ she sighed, and paused, thinking for a moment. ‘They are dealers – people who spend their whole lives around drugs – but they aren’t necessarily people we want to know. You’ll find that as you get older, if you keep taking drugs, people are going to turn their backs on you. They’ll want less and less to do with drugs, and less and less to do with you. We want more for you than to be a drug dealer.’

  ‘I’m not a drug dealer,’ I said. ‘I’m in high school. I just happen to deal drugs.’