The Feel-Good Hit of the Year

by Liam Pieper

  ‘I’m not going any further,’ he said. ‘I’m not going anywhere if you’re just going to hit me. You don’t have to hit me.’

  But I did. And it turned out he had the money after all.

  I came to convince myself I was a gangster. I learned that nine times out of ten a fight is over once one side throws a punch. That remaining 10 per cent, though, the ones where people fight back, still had me worried. To offset the probability of having to fight, I went around telling anyone who would listen how dangerous I was. I imagined that people were looking at me with a new kind of respect, one born of fear. My walk changed from the furtive, crouched scurry of a chubby teenager trying to hide his breasts to a gangster’s strut – chest puffed out, shoulders rolling from side to side with each stride, like my bulging muscles were throwing me off balance. People glanced at me, then quickly looked away. At the time I thought they were just being street smart, but the response was probably closer to confusion and pity at the chubby, ponytailed androgyne twitching down the street like a traumatised chimp who’d escaped from a Krispy Kreme research facility. But I believed I looked dangerous and that’s what mattered.

  Getting into an actual fight with some clients who whipped my arse and took my money in the alley behind a 7-Eleven should have been an early sign that I wasn’t supposed to be a criminal. But I was stubborn, and Darwin wasn’t the boss of me, and I was determined to keep plying my trade. It’s not easy to think about stopping selling drugs; it can be harder than giving up using. You get used to the easy money, the endless, stress-free drug supply and the adulation of addicts, who greet you when you walk in the door with the crafty but brainless enthusiasm of a beagle.

  After my first beat-down, I looked at my situation logically, dabbing antiseptic onto my cuts. I wasn’t planning on going straight any time soon but I had what marketing types call a ‘crisis of publicity’. Word was spreading around the neighbourhood that I was soft. If I kept going, I could expect to be ripped off and robbed time and again. The only other option, as I saw it, was to learn to fight.

  I found a martial arts school in a tiny studio above a bar. I was so painfully nervous that I walked around the block three times before I stepped through the doorway of the dojo to ask about joining the club. As I climbed up the narrow stairwell the concrete echoed with a staccato crack accompanied by an angry bellow. At the top of the stairs I saw a wiry man in his sleeveless black uniform laying into a heavy punching bag with rhythmic, lightning-fast roundhouse kicks, each of which bent the bag in two. It was awesome. As I stepped across the threshold he spoke, without taking his eyes off the bag or breaking his tempo: ‘You bow when you enter the dojo or I’ll rip your fucking face off.’  That was how I met Sensei.

  The sign out the front advertised ‘Mixed Martial Arts’ but Sensei taught a brutal mix of street fighting, kickboxing and jujitsu. ‘Most fights will end up on the ground,’ he announced from the front of the class as we stood at attention in ready-stance, knees bent and fists cocked loosely at the waist. ‘So when you’re there just break an elbow and the fight is yours.’ Sensei had honed his pragmatic fighting style over a couple of decades of petty crime, during which he alternated spells in prison with brief periods when he laundered money and taught martial arts to teenagers. He was the coolest motherfucker I’d ever met.

  I hung on his every word, carefully copying his movements as he demonstrated kicking techniques, and aping the way he hissed when he kicked the heavy bag. He spoke to the part of me that left each Spiderman film pretending I could shoot webs from my fingers when nobody was watching. In a way that must have been obvious to everybody in the room but me, I started to model my behaviour on Sensei’s.

  He was a little more than 6 foot but seemed taller: lean and long like he’d been threaded together out of high-tension rope. He was pushing forty but had the angry energy of a much younger man. Whenever he was forced to sit still he would seethe and bob, jiggling a knee against the floor, rolling his shoulders or bunching up a fist to crack his knuckles against his temple. Only his receding hairline gave away his age, that and a few lines around his temples, framing the same watchful, baleful eyes I’d seen belonging to a caged cockatoo.

  None of that bothered me. The fact that he could kick through a brick wall was all I needed to know about him. I was a teenager and casting about for a more accessible authority figure than those already around. I didn’t feel comfortable going to my own dad with problems about girls, schoolwork or troublesome clients; when he was feeling frivolous he liked to make jokes about Camus. Sensei gave me a more relatable role model.

  Three times a week Sensei taught me the ins and outs of real-life combat situations, which I took in as catechism. ‘I’ll show you how to kill a man with one punch. Grab me here,’ I urged my friends. ‘No, no. Here.’ After a few weeks of classes, one of the better students approached me as we stretched down. ‘Oi,’ he said by way of introduction, ‘do you choof?’  That was how I met the Ryans.

  The Ryans were a group of siblings who all trained at the club, all lived together in a house around the block and all smashed cones after class with the grim determination normally seen in athletes. They had names like Arlen and Molloy, and shared the same broadly Irish features and dirty-blond Kurt Cobain hairdo. I was never sure who were actual Ryans and who had just moved into the share house and become Ryans by osmosis. There was only one female, Di, a sandy-haired, tough-talking teenager who could hold her own with the rest of the boys as they smoked themselves into stupors and told filthy, violent stories. I quickly became hopelessly infatuated with her.

  Happy months passed in which I spent almost no time at home. My parents seemed pleased that I’d taken an interest in sport and encouraged me to take Hamish along to the club, an idea that I bucked against. I didn’t want him tagging along to spoil the fun with my new friends and, besides, I didn’t want him to learn how to fight as well as me. I was proud of my developing muscles and high kicks and the fact that for the first time I could, if I so chose, whoop my big brother’s arse. I wasn’t about to let an upper hand like that go.

  I would fidget my way through school, leap around the gym doing fly kicks and grapples after hours, and then go home with the Ryans to have competitive bong races and eat microwave schnitzels. Between the martial arts training and the Ryans’ companionship, I changed. I got leaner, stronger and faster, and I started to flirt, in my own awkward way, with Di. When the Ryans got hyped up on cones lightly sprinkled with meth and started practising knife fighting, I would steal off to Di’s room. There we’d share bourbon and Coke from a can and I’d listen to her dissect Slim Shady lyrics in rambling, profound exegeses.

  We became close, quickly. When business called she would keep a lookout while I did deals in the alleyway. It was all very nice. It was the first time I had ever really felt comfortable around a girl. In my eyes, any kind of romance was off the table, in large part due to the half-dozen siblings in the next room who were all trained to kill. That lack of sexual tension let me relax and become something other than the skittish, uneasy weirdo I normally was around the opposite sex.

  One night when we were drunk, she walked me to the door, leaned over and kissed me lightly on the lips. I was stunned, moving and thinking slowly, as she leaned back and smiled at me, suddenly shy herself. Her hair fell over her face as she looked across and said goodnight. The door closed. As the lock snicked gently into place I woke up. I raised a hand to knock, then put it down again. As I walked home and all through the next day I could feel her lips against mine, like the afterimages a candle burns at the backs of your eyes.

  Di invited me to a party at the Ryan Palace one weekend. It was a big deal to me: the parties at the Ryans’ were infamous. People got into fights at those parties. People got stabbed. People got laid. So I made an effort. I usually wore my hair long and ragged but that night I brushed it and tied it back in a ponytail, and I washed my best hoodie. I was jittery with nerves when I walked in, all the more so when
I found Sensei sitting at the kitchen table.

  ‘These cunts tell me you’re a fucking dealer!’ he yelled, pointing a finger at me. I was mortified. He bounced over, took my arm and hustled me outside, where it was quiet.

  ‘Word is you’re a bit of a hardcore,’ Sensei said, punching me affectionately on the shoulder. ‘Stick with me, kid. I’ll make you rich. Whatever you want. Weed? I got weed. Pills? I can get ’em for you, three bucks a pop. No problem. I’ll look after you, kid. Whatever you need.’

  My little heart swelled.

  ‘Seriously, kid. You ever need anything. You need somebody’s head kicked in? You only need to ask. You’re a mate. I look after my mates.’

  After that I hung out with Sensei a fair bit.There was an unspoken demarcation between Sensei the teacher, Monday to Friday, stern and upstanding, and Sensei the mate, who I’d see on weekends at the Ryans’. One weekend he saw me glance longingly at Di from across the room.

  ‘You like her, don’t ya?’

  I admitted that yes, I did, but I couldn’t say anything to her. She was a Ryan and I wouldn’t want to damage my friendship with the family.

  ‘You won’t, guaranteed. I fucked her,’ he said helpfully. ‘I fucked her in the butt.’

  He made a strange gesture: a loose uppercut that he terminated by opening his fist and pursing his fingers into a steeple, then splaying them out like an Italian grandma illustrating something delicious. The action perturbed me. What did he mean? Did his penis taper off and unfurl like a tulip? Did it explode outwards into a grappling hook like a cat’s?

  He laid a paternal hand on my shoulder. ‘She’s a great root. You should have a stab. She loves it. She’s a massive slut, honest.’

  Sensei was full of advice. He’d train me in combat, and once in a while he’d teach me a little about the world. He showed me how to cut a bag of speed with a benign agent to make the dollar stretch further. Sensei advocated glucose energy powder, which had the same weight, volume and texture as fine powdery speed. The trick was to cut it down to a 70 per cent speed–30 per cent neutral mix.

  ‘Any more than that and people will be able to taste it when they rub it into their gums. Any more than that and they may as well be snorting NutraSweet.’

  He taught me how to fight but, more importantly, he promised that next time I got into trouble he would drop whatever he was doing and head down to sort it out. I’d seen Sensei take a baseball bat to the arm and shrug it off like an insult before snatching the weapon from his assailant and choking him unconscious with it. It felt good to know he was on my side.

  Sensei never actually intervened in any of my conflicts, but the knowledge that he could kept me out of trouble. I had the sort of swagger that only a little man with the ability to summon divine retribution can muster. I came further out of my shell; I refined my personality, turned my shyness into a sword. When I got into a confrontation with a pushy client, I would let my voice level drop to a fell whisper, lean in close and murmur threats in their ear almost tenderly. I changed myself from a bashful pusher into a psychotic dwarf who seemed likely to fly off the handle given the slightest push. Of course, I never had to. The thing about fighting is that the more you act like you can, the less you’ll have to. My swagger saw me through, thank God. I was rarely called on to fight. That didn’t stop me thinking that I could, though.

  I carried a flick-knife in the back pocket of my jeans. When I thought the situation would be particularly dicey, I slid a trolley pole up the sleeve of my jacket. I never thought too hard about what it might be like to have to use my weapons; they were just part of my outfit. Arming myself was just something I did before I left the house, like gelling my hair.

  My rounds grew too time-consuming and far-ranging for me to deliver by foot or pushbike, so I hired a driver. Sunny was in his early twenties, a waiter at the casino with a lisp and a taste for the finer things in life. I’d flip him a bag of drugs or a few bucks and he would drive me around all night while we talked crime, bumped Dr Dre through the subwoofers and stared down teenagers from the windows of his Mazda 323. In between rolling blunts with the shells of vanilla cheroots, we passed the time with him lecturing me on the correct way to listen to hip-hop.

  ‘A crib is a house, and a shorty used to mean someone young or new to the game, but since you white people have started listening to rap it’s come to mean a fine-bodied female,’ he would say. ‘You’ll find that a lot of terms have changed since rappers started pandering to suburban America. Like the word “nigger”. When nigger first started being used in rap it was a deliberate effort to reclaim the word from the oppression of white racists. I would be proud to use the word nigger. Now its use by Ja Rule and other establishment tools has diminished its impact to the point where it’s a tool of oppression again. When whitey started listening to rap it stopped being the music of liberation and became a yoke for the black man again.’ Sunny was Indian, incidentally.

  Sunny stole one of his dad’s hunting rifles, a lever-action Winchester .22, which had escaped John Howard’s purge in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre and wound up in the boot of Sunny’s car, wrapped in a picnic blanket. Occasionally, when I wanted to impress someone, I would walk them around to the back of Sunny’s car and throw the blanket back to show the rifle, its barrel gleaming red in the brake lights. I’d grin and raise one eyebrow to convey my meaning: ‘Look! It’s a gun! It’s for shooting!’

  Between my weapons and the shadowy promise of protection from Sensei, I felt pretty good about myself. He boosted my confidence and helped me to be a better criminal, but the way he really changed my life was by getting me drugs. He got me lots of drugs, really good drugs, at really good prices. He was extremely well connected, with associates from all across Melbourne. I would meet him in the Ryans’ kitchen and hand over a fat roll of money and he would return a couple of hours later with bags of product. He was like the Aldi of narcotic wholesale. On top of the huge stinking bushels of Adelaide hydro I bought from him, he lovingly catalogued the other specials he could do me: crystalline sacks of dirty brown bikie speed, delicate vials of pristine liquid LSD, festive bags of multicoloured pills.

  The drugs that Sensei brought me changed my business. They were cheap and they were amazing, so much so that I stopped taking them altogether. They interfered with my training, and some part of me, the reptilian survival instinct, recognised that if I indulged in drugs this cheap and this good so young in life, I would wake up in ten years’ time wearing fishnets on an LA sidewalk.

  Ardian had a truism he liked to roll out whenever he had a captive audience: drugs were a window, not a door. I was starting to see it differently, though. Through Sensei I realised how lucrative the whole thing could be if I applied myself, and the first part of that meant staying away from the product. Between Sensei’s leading example and my hip-hop records that exhorted me not to get high on my own supply, I stopped indulging. I didn’t want to risk losing the good thing I had going. Money was more important to me than getting high, but being respected by the people I worked with was more important to me than anything.

  The money was rolling in and I got cocky as I started turning over thousands of dollars a month. For a long time I’d been in the habit of smoking and drinking whatever money I made with Di and the Ryans, but as the summer approached I hoarded my cash to stock up for Christmas.

  The Christmas and New Year period is the harvest season for drug dealers, as cashed-up tradies and professionals let their hair down and spend a few days getting blissfully toasted. I’d learned from the previous Christmas how quickly your stock could run out, so I’d asked Sensei to sort me out with an order large enough to see me through the summer. I met him at Castle Ryan and handed him an envelope full of ATM-fresh notes. He shoved the envelope absentmindedly into his back pocket, winked and loped out the door on his rangy, lethal legs.

  Four hours passed before I called him and got his voicemail. I tried again an hour later and found his phone switched off. Around
two in the morning I went home to bed; I had school in the morning. I didn’t hear back from Sensei for a week, and even then that was only because Di had given me his gym bag filled with a change of clothes and a pair of electronic scales he’d left at the Ryans’. I took that home with me and a few hours later got a text from his mobile: YOU SNEAKY CUNT HOW DARE YOU TOUCH MY PROPERTY FUCK WITH ME AND YOULL GET THE HORNS.

  It wasn’t a soothing message. I thought of the first time I’d laid eyes on Sensei, when he’d broken the heavy bag in half with his roundhouse kicks. I decided I didn’t need ‘THE HORNS’. At the same time, though, I needed my product – my customers were getting restless, and I wasn’t the same defenceless kid I was all those months ago. I texted back: Hello Sensei. Where’s my money?

  There was a pause of about three minutes while I sat watching the phone in my hand. I made myself breathe evenly. Then he texted me the address of an abandoned servo in the eastern suburbs, and a time.

  That night I loaded the .22 and Sunny and I drove to the meet. I slipped my knife into my pants and hid my trusty trolley pole in the gap between the passenger-side seat and the handbrake. I wasn’t anticipating violence but I was ready for it. As we pulled into the car park of the defunct servo, I looked for Sensei’s battered Holden and saw that we were alone. He was late. I swore and rolled down the window to light a cigarette, and Sensei’s face thrust through the opening.

  He was very, very angry and very, very high. His jaw was grinding and his eyes were massive, empty and glazed black. His face was centimetres from mine and, with his receding hairline, big black eyes and lips pulled back in fury as he snarled abuse at me, he resembled a very fast, impossibly cross cartoon kangaroo.

  ‘You little shit!’ Specks of spit hit my face as he yelled. ‘What fucking right do you have to touch my shit? Where’s my bag? Step out of this car and I’ll kick the fucking shit out of you!’