The Feel-Good Hit of the Year

by Liam Pieper

  On the drive over, I’d carefully rehearsed how the scene was going to play out. He would threaten me, I would issue a snappy retort and be vaguely menacing in my soft-spoken way. He would apologise and give me my product, maybe even give my money back, and the world would continue turning.

  Instead, I shrank and thrust his bag at him, not unlike the way you might shove a crucifix at a vampire, and squeaked, ‘You disappeared! This is collateral.’

  He snatched the bag from me, unzipped it and checked the contents. I pushed my luck. ‘Where’s my money?’

  It was the wrong thing to say. ‘Your money’s gone!’ He was screaming, his voice echoing around the empty servo. ‘It was gone the second you touched my fucking stuff. You hear me? My stuff. You don’t touch my stuff. ’ He flung the bag onto the concrete and kicked it. He stamped on it a few times for emphasis. I could hear his possessions cracking under his boots. ‘You don’t touch my fucking stuff. ’

  He reached in through the window to grab me by the collar and instinctively I leaned back. My hand went to the handbrake for balance and his eyes followed to where the trolley pole was resting. ‘You sneaky little cunt,’ he hissed, and pulled me through the window.

  He banged my head once against the roof of the car and I went limp. I would have fallen had I not been held firmly around the neck by the ridge of his forearm. It’s a sleeper hold, I thought as his hand discovered the knife in the waistband of my pants where I had tucked it. Sensei laughed as he flicked out the blade. As he pressed the point into the back of my skull I felt my bladder go. It’s a sleeper hold. My mind fumbled for the counter grapple. I thought about the gun, lying uselessly in the boot, wrapped in a picnic blanket. Curiously, I wondered whether I’d left the milk out when I’d made tea earlier in the day. If I left it out, it’ll be spoiled in this heat, I thought, and also, I’ve wet myself.

  ‘You’re a boy, Liam. Just a boy playing a man’s game,’ Sensei told me, and I realised I’d heard something similar before. It took me a minute to locate the memory. When we were children living in Oakleigh, Mum had used a big, seventies-style plastic juicer to make orange juice every morning. It was the kind where you put in whole fruit and vegetables and razor-sharp blades would tear them apart. One day, when I was around four, and thirsty for juice but not understanding how the machine worked, I stuck my hand into the juicer. Mum, who’d been in the shower, stepped out to find me screaming and holding up a mangled hand with strips of flesh hanging off it like the fronds of a jellyfish. She drove me to the hospital in her bathrobe, her hair still dripping wet, running every red light. On the way home, once I’d been stitched up and it was clear that I wasn’t going to lose any fingers, she was audibly relieved but still exasperated and scared. ‘You should never play with grown-up things, Liam. You’re just a boy and so many adult things can hurt you.’

  Sensei didn’t sound exasperated or scared. He was mad, spittle foaming across my shoulders as he barked, ‘Now you’re going to get back in your little fucking car. And if I ever see you again I’m going to use this knife to fuck you in the arse. And if your little friend there doesn’t stay in his seat until I’m gone, he gets the same. You got it?’

  I nodded and winced, feeling the knife against my brainstem. ‘Good,’ Sensei said. A car pulled up and he climbed into it, but I didn’t see him go. I was scrabbling for the Mazda’s door. Once I was inside, Sunny started laughing hysterically.

  ‘That,’ said Sunny, ‘was one scary nigger.’

  Sunny drove me to the Ryans’, where they gave me a bourbon. My hand was shaking so badly the ice in the drink sounded like a tiny wind chime. When I told the Ryans what had happened they shook their heads in collective disapproval.

  ‘You dumb cunt,’ one said. ‘You shouldn’t have given Sensei that much cash upfront. He’s a gambling addict. It’ll all be gone on the pokies by now. You won’t see it again.’

  I never went back to training. The thought of running into Sensei was enough to panic me. I needn’t have bothered; he left the club a few weeks later. A few weeks after that, Di announced she was pregnant and that she was moving in with Sensei.

  Soon I drifted away from the Ryans. I borrowed money and rebuilt my business from the ground up, selling gram bags to schoolkids. A year after my meeting with Sensei, a rumour reached me that he’d gone on a bender and disappeared, leaving Di to move back in with the Ryans, where they stayed home and smoked cones and took turns to play Tekken and rock the baby while he slept.

  8

  After Sensei handed my arse to me at that servo, I redoubled my efforts to make myself more threatening. I spent my days pumping iron and jogging, pushing around smaller men, who weren’t easy to find, and just generally indulging in gangster fantasies. I dreaded losing out in another physical confrontation and so I adjusted my business practices to be as surly and menacing as possible. I stopped hanging out with clients and started collecting old debts. I threw caution to the wind and openly threatened recalcitrant clients over the phone. It never occurred to me that this might get me arrested.

  Here’s the thing about humans. If you are deluded enough, if you devote all your resources to perpetuating the ridiculous, tenuous lie that you’ve built your life on, you can make it work. I surrounded myself with people who would buttress the illusion that I was very dangerous indeed: sycophants and low-rent thugs who I could buy with small amounts of cash or weed. Sometimes they would ask me to join them for a puff, but I always said no. I didn’t like the way it made me feel any more. The giddy euphoria I remembered from when I was a kid was gone. Instead, dark, paranoiac thoughts crashed through my brain. After a few puffs my bluster would leave me, supplanted by insecurities about how fragile my little empire was. So instead I drank spirits, and listened to west-coast hip-hop.

  With the zeal that only reformed smokers have, I started to judge those who still smoked. I shook my head at my old friends who got so wasted they decided to skip parties to stay home and watch soccer on television, and sighed condescendingly when Mum finished doing yoga in front of a Star Trek re-run and offered me a blast of her celebratory smoke. ‘No, thank you. I’ve quit, don’t you know. Oh! You’ve got a hash pipe! How quaint.’ I saw weed as insufferably daggy, a cantrip for the elderly and the callow.

  I stopped thinking of my clients as friends, and started treating them as livestock: Jessie the unhappy punk-musician could be milked for $180 a week, James the awkward engineer for a healthy $250. This shift wasn’t entirely mercenary; I just couldn’t stand to be around stoned people any more. Their slow-moving lifestyles, the weekend-long video-game binges, the glacial philosophical sessions that I’d once adored pained me now. I grew short-tempered and curt with the meandering mannerisms of hippies, and, one by one, I cut off people who contradicted my reinvented Ayn Randian world view. I sealed myself in a chrysalis of hubris and self-aggrandisement, and waited for my metamorphosis into a real, grown-up criminal.

  I spent less and less time at home, killing hours driving around with Sunny, building up my business again. Slowly I amassed cash, in rolls of crumpled twenties I tied up with rubber bands and hid about the house. I started to skip a lot of school, at first to make longer runs, and then, when I realised how easy it was to get away with it, just because I was lazy. None of my teachers seemed to have anything to say that I could use in life, and I didn’t see how going on to university was going to help.

  Ardian had got halfway through a science degree in which he’d drifted from biology to archaeology to geology, before finally dropping out to work odd jobs and concentrate on his music. He moved into a new share house a couple of suburbs over and threw his twenty-first birthday party there, where my family kicked around the backyard with his friends, tripping on acid and watching the fire-twirlers. At some point, my dad cornered Ardian to ask him when he thought he’d be going back to uni.

  ‘I don’t see the point,’ Ardian said. ‘There’s nothing there they can teach me.’ He seemed resigned to this fact, but I w
as excited because this gave me a precedent. It looked like Ardian was having the time of his life tooling about Melbourne, playing keys in jam bands. Sometimes my friends and I would head around to his place, where they would smoke pot and we would all listen to jazz records. The first few times I was chuffed, but, slowly, I started to make excuses not to go. In my eyes Ardian was still a perfect bohemian and a role model, but the finest of fault-lines were starting to show in my hero-worship.

  The on-again off-again romance he’d enjoyed with his high-school sweetheart Callie was off again, and he was, to my dismay, sad. Most times I saw him he hit me up for weed, which I started to give him for free. I suddenly felt embarrassed that my older brother was asking for tick or a loan of $20. It jarred with my world view to think someone could be grown-up and independent and cool and still be unhappy. Sometimes I would visit and he wouldn’t say anything for an hour; he’d just sink further into his big, leather armchair while Billie Holiday played on repeat. Other times he would greet me at the door, literally bouncing with excitement while he rattled on about books he had read or concerts he had seen.

  He became fixated on Lupin III, a suave cat burglar from a manga series we used to watch, and started planning criminal heists of the kind he’d seen in the movies. Using a pencil and a napkin, he sketched out a plan to steal a shop display of mini-disc players by tunnelling through the wet wall of an electronics store with a rock pick left over from his geology class. Grinning maniacally, he asked me if I wanted ‘in on the caper’. ‘Of course!’ I said, which made him enthusiastic, until his mood crashed and he became morose. ‘Oh, I’m a bad person, you know? That I would steal from some businessman to make myself rich? At their expense? Don’t ever be like me.’

  For the first time in my life, I was beginning to think that I didn’t want to grow up to be like my older brother. His moods threw me; I could never predict which Ardian I was going to get when he opened the door. And when he lapsed into one of his misty-eyed reveries about his inherent badness, I felt like laughing in his face. ‘You’re not bad!’ I wanted to say. ‘I’m the real deal. I’ve been in fights and I’ve got scars! Look at them! LOOK!’

  I don’t think I’d ever seen Ardian hit anyone, apart from me when we were little. He would dole out Chinese burns or Stop Hitting Yourselves, or the dreaded Typewriters, where he would pin down my shoulders with his knees and tap on my sternum with his index fingers and I would scream and plead for him to stop and he would cheerfully yell, ‘I can’t! We’re on DEADLINE!’

  I could only think of one time of late when he had lost his temper. My buddy Marco had lit a cigarette while reclining in an armchair. Ardian, who had been playing piano, wheeled around and leaped across the room. He reached under the chair and upended it, spilling Marco onto the floor. ‘I said no smoking!’ he roared. ‘You motherfucker! NO SMOKING!’ All present shrank against the walls, unsure where this fury had come from. ‘GET OUT!’ he screamed. ‘Everyone get the fuck out!’  We scuttled away, although Ardian’s apoplectic rage had quickly subsided and he’d become tearful and apologetic.

  ‘Well,’ we all agreed, as we caught the train home, ‘that was weird.’

  Ardian had always been weird but in the best possible way. While each of us Pieper children was a little askew, he wore it the best. I remember the moment at the start of adolescence when I came to the unhappy realisation that I was an odd kid and would never be cool. When Ardian realised that about himself, rather than let it get him down, instead of sweating it, he went and started a band.

  His friends, who were legion and chiefly starry-eyed young women, couldn’t talk about him without using the terms ‘very special’ or ‘life-changing’. The thing is, it remains impossible to describe him without using some kind of revolting new-age argot. As a teenager, he really did seem like an old soul, at once wise beyond his years and touchingly naive about life and its consequences.

  Even as he rounded his twenties, there was something otherworldly about him, a quality reflected in the way he lived. I couldn’t really imagine him ever working in an office, and neither could he. When I’d ask him what he planned to do with his life, he’d talk about starting a fully sustainable, off-the-grid commune in Tasmania.

  His moods were increasingly erratic. He would have manic jags where he would leave the house in the morning and walk back in come evening, holding an aquarium full of fish and trailing a pretty girl he’d met on the train on the way from an acting audition he’d decided to attend on the spur of the moment. Then there’d be days when he didn’t leave the house at all. He’d just sit in the lounge room, smoking cigarettes, inhaling nitrous oxide from a 1000-litre canister he’d scored from a dentist and watching daytime TV. Whether he was up or down, he was always getting thinner and he had dark circles where the sleep deprivation pooled under his eyes.

  He’d taken a job as a night nurse at a care facility for people with severe brain injuries. He would sleep in a little room there until he was awoken by screaming, then he’d get up to change sheets soiled with drool and vomit and shit and blood, clean up the patient as best he could and try to calm them down. As the weeks went by he became more and more withdrawn, less prone to upswings, more consistently down.

  One of the head nurses took a liking to him and started giving him day shifts, which meant taking the higher-functioning patients out on excursions. He was given a wheelchair-accessible vehicle and a list of approved activities, but after a couple of trips to the zoo and the Pancake Parlour, Ardian decided he could show them a better time at his place. He started bringing patients home, where they would garden or sit in the lounge room with Ardian and his housemates, watching Oprah and jugging the nitrous. I visited once to find a heavy-set forty-something in pyjamas screaming in delight while Ardian popped N2O and sang a little tune. The patient seemed to be having the time of his life, but when the care facility found out they didn’t see it that way and Ardian was fired.

  One afternoon I dropped in and he was sitting in the watery sunlight of his front yard, next to his motorcycle. He loved that machine, a tinny 110cc postie bike that he’d won at a government auction and fixed up to zip around town. It had maybe six moving parts but he lovingly oiled and tuned every one of them, and chromed and buffed the rest. Today the bike was totalled, scratched all up one side from an accident.

  ‘Oh, shit, no!’ I said in dismay when I saw it. ‘What happened?’

  Ardian slowly turned his gaze to focus on the bike, then me. He didn’t say anything.

  I tried again. ‘So? How’s work?’

  ‘They fired me.’

  ‘Oh . . . Well . . . No more night shifts at least, right?’

  Now his eyes locked on mine. ‘I don’t know why they don’t just kill them, Liam,’ he said. ‘I really don’t. It would be so much kinder.’ I left shortly after, spooked.

  Then he disappeared. One day he just vanished from Melbourne, skipping out on his housemates, leaving his room as it was the morning he’d left the house, the rent unpaid. Nobody could tell us where he’d gone: old girlfriends hadn’t seen him, and he had drifted away from many of his old friends. My parents were worried sick and made frantic phone calls to police, friends, former teachers, but nobody knew anything. Then, after a month or so had passed, we received a postcard from Byron Bay. In it, he wrote fondly about the family, saying even though he was missing us, he couldn’t come home just yet because the energy of the Byron sky was just too beautiful. His sign-off was sweet if slightly defensive: ‘I love you guys. It might sound like I’m tripping but I’m not tripping. I’m not.’

  Ardian turned up again a few weeks after that, driving a kombi van full of Canadian hippies he’d met up north. He pulled into the driveway of his old share house unannounced to discover that his room had been given to someone else. Undeterred, he and a she-hippie he’d hooked up with on the drive down started living in the van in the driveway, until his former housemates finally had enough and asked him to find somewhere else to park his home.<
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  Still, he came back energised from his time up north, showing off new philosophies and tricks with his firesticks. When I asked him where he’d been, he shrugged and said, ‘On a caper.’

  He found a new share house with a bunch of Goths and moved his possessions in: lava lamp, milk crates full of books and CDs, and a mattress covered in stains, some sinister, some jolly. The new place was the kind of hellish, cold, dark, beige-carpeted share-house purgatory that Melbourne throws up now and again, but Ardian seemed happy there. He quit smoking and started working out; when he saw us he would run to the wall, grinning like a child, to show me how many handstand push-ups he could do. I was glad he was on the up again, although I didn’t understand where it was coming from all of a sudden.

  I couldn’t understand either how Ardian had let himself become so downhearted. He’d had the same opportunities to be happy as I had, and I was doing fine. By cleaning out my clientele and cutting away the deadwood, I’d revitalised the business and was dealing mainly with wealthy university students, who paid premium rates and on time. Plus they were fun to talk to, drove nice cars, and the girls were cute and flirtatious. I could pull off my ridiculous gangster dress-up when dealing with those cloistered private-school milklings, wreathing myself in bluster and bullshit, which is what they were looking for anyway.

  Ardian called one night as I was heading out the door to visit a party full of moneyed, rebellious schoolkids. Sunny had just buzzed me to get into the car when the landline rang.

  ‘Hey, Liam.’

  ‘ ’Sup?’

  ‘What are you up to?’

  ‘Nothing much. Just about to head out.’

  ‘Cool . . .’ He trailed off.

  ‘How can I help, bro?’ I wandered over to the mirror to check out my reflection. I looked good, but I thought I would look even fiercer if I could grow a little stubble.