The Feel-Good Hit of the Year

by Liam Pieper

  Nearly half a century after Cliff Ross hit on the idea of feeding birds to drum up business for Fantasyland, every day at 8.45 a.m. someone will still turn up to feed the pelicans who gather on the foreshore. It’s something of an institution. Tourists driving up the coast will detour through Kalbarri to see the majestic birds glide in for food. They are disappointed on days when nobody turns up to feed the pelicans, but not as much as the birds themselves, who, if they aren’t fed on time, will waddle across the road to the museum, pecking on the door, impatient for the long-dead Ross to come out and give them their fish.

  10

  People have a habit of burying grief in metaphor – black dogs, roller-coasters, labyrinths, fog monsters – all in an effort to make real the suffocating bleakness that descends over them. They tend to glorify the concept, to try to turn it into something epic: a creature to be overcome, a journey that starts with a step. So here’s my metaphor: grief is a long, dark night in a wet sleeping bag at a shitty music festival that everyone seems to be enjoying but you. It’s cold, it’s raining, it’s unpleasant, but you’re not going to wriggle out of your damp cocoon because the alternatives are even worse.

  Our family was broken, and everything we encountered fed back into what we’d lost. Our thoughts were circular, a macabre game of Six Degrees where you could bring any moment back to your unhappiness in a few easy steps.

  ‘Where are you going, Liam?’

  ‘To Ben’s house.’

  ‘What are you going to do there?’

  ‘Hang out.’

  ‘Are you going to do drugs?’

  ‘No, just play Nintendo.’

  ‘Your brother played Nintendo, and then he did drugs. And now he’s dead.’

  You’d think that when drugs start killing your family you would shy away from them, maybe rethink your lifestyle choices: take up squash or macramé or something. But that’s not how it happened for us. Instead, we kept taking the drugs but we turned up the volume, thinking they’d give us comfort, some respite from the grief. Humans are simple creatures: we’ll lean towards something that we once enjoyed long after it’s no longer pleasurable, long after it’s no longer an effective crutch.

  The main problem with medicating your grief with drugs is that it doesn’t help. It only seems to, and even then only for an hour. The high is familiar and therefore comforting, but what it does to your brain doesn’t help. You’re still sad and now you’re also anxious and depressed, your brain chemistry all in a lather. You’ll spend the time that you’re stoned, the hours, the days, the years, pushing your memories and feelings around like a toddler with vegetables on a plate. In the end, your mind will look chewed over, but you won’t have digested anything. The grief builds and builds and you never get better. You just get sadder and sadder until, one day, you decide to die.

  It was the morning of a school day, probably a Wednesday because that was the day I’d wag phys ed to drink wine in the garage, and I’d gone into the laundry to look for my sports uniform, which I needed in order to sneak out of school without getting busted. Hungover and cranky, I stumbled from the laundry to the kitchen, which was empty. This was unusual – normally this time of morning Mum would be in the kitchen, having a quiet cry into the juicer. From outside I could hear muffled wailing, so I made myself a bowl of Weet-Bix, which I ate as I sauntered outside to find Dad’s suicide machine.

  When we first left Labassa and my parents were fighting all the time, they would often end an argument by yelling, ‘Well, then, I’m going to fucking kill myself!’ before storming out of the room. They talked about suicide with the sort of enthusiasm that left me unable to wait to try it. I didn’t really understand what it meant to kill oneself, but I could tell that it was very exciting.

  When the fighting got bad I would retreat to the end of the backyard to play with my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle dolls while waiting for the quarrel to end. ‘I’m going to fucking kill myself,’ Splinter would tell Leonardo, in my growly, slightly racist Splinter voice. ‘If it wasn’t for you and your brothers I would have defeated Shredder and the Technodrome years ago and I would be happy.’  Then I would have the turtles kill themselves one by one – Donatello built a euthanasia machine, Leonardo fell on his sword – and Splinter was happy again.

  My games with the Ninja Turtles would escalate until I climbed onto the back of the couch and threw myself off, emulating Gollum at the end of The Lord of the Rings. I used to follow Dad around the house while he was trying to practise guitar and beg him to help me kill myself, as I understood it from cartoons: buy me some dynamite, drop an anvil on my head. Dad tried his best to turn my imagination in a more wholesome direction.

  He would often read books to me. My favourite was a French children’s book, The House that Beebo Built, which we read cover to cover every night before bed. It was about a Parisian Metro worker and inventor who retires to the countryside to build his dream house, which he packs with all kinds of weird inventions. Eventually some evil property developers come to tear down his house so he locks all the doors and starts building a tower annex to get away from them. When he runs out of building materials, he uses four planks of wood to build a staircase, taking the plank from the bottom to fashion the next step, with nothing but faith, ingenuity and a touch of po-mo to escape into the clouds.

  Dad’s suicide machine wasn’t Beebo’s work. It wasn’t even Philip Nitschke’s. It was a bit like the playful death machines I’d built for Donatello when I would play suicides with my Ninja Turtle action figures: amateurish and improvised. Dad had taken the family station wagon and used a roll of electrical tape and the garden hose to connect the exhaust pipe to the driver’s-side window. The window was sealed with tape to create a vacuum and he was sitting behind the wheel, revving the engine. It was the same car that Ardian had learned to drive in, the same hose that had grown incrementally shorter every time he’d cut a length off to make a bong out of a Gatorade bottle. It was lazy symbolism.

  It took me a minute to figure out what was happening. I had the vague impression that Mum was screaming and Hamish was crying, but everything else was fuzzy. I’d like to say that I assumed that special kind of cool reserved for action heroes, where they instinctively know what to do, but, given that this was 2001, it’s safe to say I was probably already high.

  First I walked around to the driver’s-side window and tapped on it. Dad ignored me, kept his eyes closed and revved the engine again. The Nissan screamed to be let out of neutral. I tried talking to him, then to punch in the window, which isn’t as easy as it looks in the movies. My fist bounced off the glass, making me feel silly on top of everything else. Sucking on my bruised knuckles, I walked to the back of the car where I tugged the hose out of the exhaust. A great cloud of sooty gas choked out. I walked to the front of the car and tapped on the windscreen, this time with the hose, until Dad looked up. He slumped in his seat and stopped revving. Then he turned off the ignition and sat quietly until it was time for him to go to work.

  I was cross at Dad for making me hurt my knuckles but part of me admired him. He’d had the balls to make a move towards the checkout, albeit in a melodramatic, baby-boomerish sort of way, and it seemed like a sensible option. All of us, I think, thought about it.

  Throughout 2001 I did my best to kill myself too, without ever really thinking about it. I’d inherited Ardian’s motorcycle and I would ride it around, drunk and high, without a helmet, impressed at how cavalier I was. Occasionally, just occasionally, I’d get a sudden urge to oversteer into approaching traffic. It was a flash: a searing, visceral, almost uncontrollable desire to bang on the throttle and drop into the road, so real that I could feel myself sliding and crunching under the oncoming wheel, the adrenaline, the pain, the blackness to follow. But it passed as quickly as it came.

  The term ‘death wish’ is a misnomer. As I experienced it, it was more an ambivalence to the idea of dying: a Zen-like acceptance that death will come soon and be welcomed with the stoic resignati
on of an English bedmate. It was being so high and so low at the same time, a sensation of being pushed up and pulled down so that I hung suspended in a sparkling amniotic numbness. It was the moment I came off my motorbike and lay bruised with the cold night air coming in through the helmet’s cracked visor, realising I had nearly died, and not minding.

  About halfway through Year 12, I woke up in the middle of the night after dreaming of Ardian giving me a pep talk on the merits of death.

  ‘It’s great!’ he said. ‘No hangovers, no need for money. And I’m not saying there’s a heaven but the women over here!’ He made an appreciative lip-smacking noise, and I started awake, drenched in sweat and suddenly resolute. I looked around my room, counting out the contents of my pill bottles, the little pharmacy that kept me upright, calculating how much Valium and codeine I had, the tricky chemistry they could unleash in my system. I folded out my flick-knife and tested its bald point against a finger. Down the road, I recalled, not across the street.

  I felt I should call somebody and let them know what was happening. After my first few calls rang out, I called up my friend Ponchik, the one person trashy enough to be awake at that hour. I told him I was feeling low, that I was thinking of ending it. He thought for a moment, then said, ‘Liam, I owe you six hundred bucks. If you kill yourself, you’re never going to see that again. Are you sure you want that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then don’t.’

  So I didn’t kill myself, and Ponchik still owes me $600.

  The spectre was there for all of us. Even now, even after all these years, my heart still lurches whenever anyone in my family phones, and my thumb pauses before I can make it slide across the screen to pick up the call. In those few seconds, my mind stalls as I calculate the possibilities, going over the events of the previous weeks like a card counter, trying to predict what grim news I’ll hear on picking up. I see my little brother beaten to death by a meth head after a drug deal gone wrong. I’m caught in the visceral stillness of it – I feel the crunch of baseball bat on soft flesh and brittle bone.

  Or maybe it’s Dad. Has he swerved his motorcycle into the wrong lane of the highway that takes him home? Or maybe it’s Mum, and it’ll be the slow-burn cancer, of the lung or the stomach or the brain, and the years or months or days ticking down to a frail, whimpered exit.

  But these are just moments. You can’t cruise forever in the wake of a tragedy, any more than you can mend a broken heart by hitching it to someone else’s happiness. We die alone, yes, but we are born alone too, so the people who enrich our lives are gifts, whether they are here for a lifetime or just a few moments. The trick is not to forget that. Whenever I’m at my darkest, I remember that there is goodness in the world. That there is pain and hardship and foolishness and misery, but that is what it is to be human. Now, whenever I get down, I remember that my life will pass in an instant, and I remember the value of the sacred, transient miracle of the heart beating in my chest, each moment impossibly precious, and that today, maybe today, Ponchik will pay me back my $600.

  11

  Our house, which had always been too small for the three of us young men, seemed suddenly cavernous. With the blinds drawn I could wander through the gloom and not encounter anyone, just hear different pitches of weeping seep in from far-flung parts of the house like some ill-conceived piece of performance art. We all became familiar with the cadences of misery – stifled before-school sobbing, the slow, steady drip of tears down a nose onto a dinner plate, the uncorked animal bellow of a grieving father in the shower after the workday. Pictures of Ardian covered every available surface. The decorative bongs he had crafted in Year 8 ceramics class, which until now had been hidden from guests behind bookshelves, became priceless talismans, displayed prominently throughout the house.

  The sadness was insidious. If you luxuriate long enough in your misery, then that misery becomes a luxury. For one thing, it gave us carte blanche to do all the drugs we could get our hands on. Mum and Dad smoked a lot of pot in the weeks after Ardian’s death, sitting in silence at the kitchen table, lighting the next joint from the last, the only sounds the crackle of tobacco and the pop of a stray seed.

  I dealt with it in my own way. Since being at home got me down, after a couple of weeks off for mourning, I went back to work, throwing myself at it with a grim verve. Like unhappy people since the dawn of time, I found I could ignore the dense weight of my heart by focusing on things I could quantify. Buy this much product; sell this much; make these margins. I didn’t love maths but numbers always did what I told them, and that was infinitely comforting when all else was cockeyed.

  Part of me, a large part, ever-expanding, loved my work. Being out of the house, driving through Melbourne every night, and the little adrenaline rush when I was in a scuffle, or a police cruiser drove by in the opposite direction to Sunny’s car, took my mind off my problems.

  The parties were great as well. In a town like Melbourne, even in the sleepy south-east, an intricate web of scenes and socioeconomic strata weaved their invisible threads through the streets. Crack the surface of the suburbs and underneath there’s an ecosystem of subcultures desperately trying to thrive. They could be wildly different, but, in my experience, they all had one thing in common: everybody wanted to get high.

  Of a weekend I might make house calls to a dozen parties, whose attendees ranged from twitchy covens of gamers who lugged hulking desktop computers around to each other’s houses for days-long Counter-Strike tournaments that ran on weed and pizza, to jumping frat-style parties. The most lucrative were thrown by the private-school kids in the area, where students could afford to spend money and time taking drugs. My most valuable clients over the years were elite fuck-ups whose teachers looked the other way when they cheated on their VCE exams in the later years of high school.

  It was at a party like that where I met Sarah, who for a couple of years helped me to forget that I was miserable. The chronology of most of my formative memories is a bit unmoored in my poor old brain but I can date this meeting to around 2001 because Sisqó’s ‘Thong Song’ was playing when I first saw her. The crowd was typical of that time and place: Polish-Jewish schoolgirls, surly Russian homeboys, Italian girls who came to get buzzed on Bacardi Breezers and give the unsmiling homeboys hand jobs beneath their FUBU jackets.

  I’d turned up with a couple of friends who knew someone who knew someone who wanted to buy a bag. Once we’d sold it, we hung about, stealing beers from the bathtub and trying to chat up a group of girls, one of whom was Sarah: a cute, fresh-faced high-school student with a nice smile who seemed to buy whatever far-fetched horseshit I was trying to sell her – I think I was trying to impress her by name-dropping the Cat Empire.

  Before we left, Sarah swooped in, flowing hippie skirt swirling, bracelets jangling, flushed from the dance floor, tipsy and giddy, to ask if I wanted her number.

  ‘Give me a call!’ she giggled. ‘All the other girls will freak out about your gross goy dick! Go out with me!’  What could I be but charmed?

  I called Sarah the next day. She didn’t remember me but agreed to go on a date. I suspect she only said she’d go out with me because it would piss off her mum.

  Sarah was sweet-natured, and I was shocked to find out she didn’t do drugs at all. She hardly even drank – I’d caught her on a rare night. I found the concept strange; I’d never really been close to someone who was sober. It weirded me out that she could live her life without ever getting drunk or high. She was a couple of inches shorter than me, which is uncommon, fine-featured and beautiful. She wore her hair long, twisted into tight braids that were close enough to dreadlocks to remind me soothingly of my hippie roots but weren’t festy and gross like the real things.

  The only flaws I could find with Sarah were her obnoxious rat-like dogs, her elder sister’s unwavering hostility towards me and the fact that she was theatrically crazy. She had dreams of becoming a fine artist who was driven by her demons – a kosher Jean-Michel
Basquiat – and so when she was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, she put up her mainsail and went with it.

  She had panic attacks at school, at work, at the DVD store when I wanted to rent something other than a Leonardo DiCaprio film. Whenever we had an argument she would get a few minutes in before hyperventilating and screaming. ‘I’m having an attack,’ she would wail, ‘I can’t feel my face!’ until I went down the road to pick up some takeaway lasagne. As it turns out, she would grow up to be a hell of an artist, but only once she stopped trying to be so tortured.

  There were other problems too, such as the fact we couldn’t understand a fucking thing about each other. Her friends baffled me. They were lovely and welcoming enough towards me, but we didn’t have a lot of common ground. Like me, most of them were raised in mansions, but they got to keep theirs. They were born to palatial houses in Caulfield and, apart from a couple who burned out in India or moved to Israel, they all ended up marrying people they went to high school with and bought houses one suburb away from their parents. Of course that happens to kids at other Australian high schools; I suppose I just noticed it more as an outsider to the Jewish community. Even though I tried my hardest, I would always be on the periphery. I tried so hard to fit in – wearing Diesel, learning how to swear in Hebrew – that I went a little too far and ended up spouting Yiddish truisms like some suburban Woody Allen. In the end, Sarah had to take me aside to ask me not to sing any more songs from Fiddler on the Roof.  ‘A little matzo ball–fever is okay, but people will start to think that you’re anti-Semitic.’

  Sarah and her friends were an extremely tight-knit group. They’d known each other since birth and it was understood that their own kids would grow up together, and they had a sense of community responsibility that came with that. My own moral compass had been forged out of a blend of Catholic guilt and escapist hippie opportunism, so we were coming at life from different angles. I was thrown by their civic-mindedness so I can only imagine what they thought of me. Often, I felt I confused them. I assumed at the time that, sheltered as they were, they’d never really got to know a goy before, although looking back, there may have been other confounding factors about me.