The Feel-Good Hit of the Year

by Liam Pieper

  15

  They say that travel is the surest way to find out what you are made of. As it turns out, I’m fashioned from some kind of adamantine alloy of cocaine and Bacardi. What I discovered about myself in South America is that, given unlimited quantities of these substances, I will keep taking them forever.

  In Peru, specifically, I crossed over from what might be considered a casual to a binge drug user. Whenever I touched drugs or alcohol, the first part of my brain to turn off was the part that told me to stop taking drugs. That meant I kept drinking and smoking and snorting until I passed out, which, really, meant that we were out of drugs, and there was no way to get more, and there was no one around to play with. If I was responsible, I would say that addiction made me keep doing drugs long after they were no longer fun, but of course that’s bullshit. They’re always fun. That’s the point.

  It was about taking uppers and downers to find that perfect alchemical teetering point where I was neither too high nor too low. I might do a line of cocaine to sober up, or drink to soothe the nagging edge of an amphetamine downturn. Think of seasoning a stew right at the end of the cooking process, the tricky part where you have to try to bring out the flavours without oversalting it. It’s safe to say that by the time I creaked back into Melbourne at the end of the year, I’d well and truly broken my off switch.

  Just as every generation thinks it discovered sex, my friends and I thought we’d invented the concept of days-long partying, and we approached it with the full enthusiasm of youth. My moral system was rewritten, one component at a time, and that little voice inside my head that told me, Maybe don’t snort that off a toilet seat, and, Let’s reconsider stealing from the till of this unsatisfying retail job to buy rock, and, Perhaps let’s not sleep with our partner’s friends, became less and less assertive.

  In June 2006 there was a random Bolivian hotel room that I didn’t leave for days because I was too high to remember where I was staying. When security finally kicked me out for throwing a pot plant at some guy because he refused to stop playing Oasis’s ‘Wonderwall’ on guitar, I realised that I’d been partying in my hotel all along, a few doors up from my own room.

  And then there was the New Year’s Day party back in Melbourne where we forcibly removed our drug dealer for flipping out and choking a girl, and then found he’d left behind a $5000 bag of amphetamine, which we spent the next week smoking in a fit of righteous pique. ‘Give me that crack pipe! Let’s teach that arsehole a lesson!’

  Six months after that, frazzled and strung out on cocaine, I kissed another woman and embarked on a great, rollicking adventure in loneliness and deprivation in which I abandoned Katya, pawned the life we’d built together and moved out of the home we shared only to realise I had nowhere to go.

  For a while I crashed on friends’ couches, then I spent a month on a mattress at my parents’ house before my brother’s ghost found his way into my dreams and I stopped sleeping.

  Getting a place of my own proved tricky. I didn’t have the paper trail a good citizen is supposed to. I had no history of gainful employment and my name had never been on a lease; Katya had always been the grown-up in our relationship. It’s not as though I had enough money to pay rent and bond anyway.

  I didn’t have much luck finding a room in a share house either. I couldn’t sleep if I’d had less than half a litre of vodka, and it was hard to wake up without a little eye-opener. I’d turn up to the interviews drunk or high or hungover, and if I didn’t reek of booze, the housemates could smell the desperation on me. It was obvious at a glance that I was not quite right.

  I went to one interview in Flemington that seemed to be going well. It was a nice, well-appointed house with three flatmates, a reasonable-sized bedroom and a big kitchen. It even had a pool. We were sitting by the pool, discussing internet options, when the interviewer looked down and yelped, ‘Holy shit! What’s wrong with your hand?’

  I looked in surprise at my right hand. I’d completely forgotten that I’d mangled it in a drunken fracas the night before. I’d picked out the glass and bandaged it up prior to driving to the interview but now blood was oozing through the gauze.

  ‘Oh.’ I thought fast. ‘That was a sporting accident.’

  ‘Sporting?’

  ‘Soccer. But . . . you know . . .’ I stumbled. ‘The kind where you use your hands.’

  I didn’t get that room, or any other, and I went back to crashing at my folks’ house.

  Then one day, while I was having tea with my grandmother, she mentioned that an aunt, someone connected to me by one tendril of the nebulous web of marriage and divorce and Catholic roulette that made up the extended family, had an investment property she wasn’t doing anything with. I called her to ask if she would be interested in renting out the house. There was a long pause at the other end. ‘Sure,’ she said eventually, sounding surprised. ‘Why not?’

  The house had seen better days: specifically, the day it was built. It had been in precipitous decline ever since. When it had been erected, at the end of the seventies, it was a magnificent family home nestled among the doctors’ offices and colonial bluestones of Malvern. It had been featured as the 1979 House of the Year in Better Homes and Gardens magazine, as a paragon of architecture and good taste, but hadn’t seen a maintaining hand since. It still had its original fittings – stained-glass windows, chandeliers, two grand fireplaces, including a wood stove embedded in a load-bearing pillar in the middle of the lounge room – but they had all gone to seed. The house had been abandoned some time in the 2000s, and then slumped into undignified middle age.

  Wall-to-wall shag-pile carpeting had long since matted into one springy dreadlock. The foundations had given way and the floor slanted dramatically from south to north. The house had two bathrooms, one of which had been annexed by a family of possums. Generations of ivy had covered the house in a carapace of petrified vines, penetrated the long-dead central-heating ducts and punched in all the windows on the top floor. The vines actually added some structural integrity to the place. It was held together by living plants and asbestos.

  I spotted some of the carcinogenic plasterboard while being given the grand tour.

  ‘Say,’ I said, pointing to a wall. ‘Is that asbestos?’

  My aunt, who was walking through the house, enthusing about the vintage style of the place, paused.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But that’s blue asbestos. The good kind. What you want to watch out for is green asbestos.’

  There was plenty of both colours and more in the backyard, which had once been a carefully landscaped garden and was now a Mad Max–esque wasteland of abandoned building materials and burned-out fridges. Great piles of red, blue and green cladding, the full rainbow of asbestos, were loosely covered in corrugated iron. If I scraped away the detritus underfoot, I could see rough-hewn bluestone cobbles etched with the initials of the convicts who had laid them. The whole place reeked of decay, despair and abandoned dreams.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ I said.

  I called around and put together a team of people who were willing to rent rooms in what was essentially a squat for a couple of bucks a day. Jules and his cousin Darce each took a room, as did Lilly. We all had our problems: Darce loved his booze a little too well; Jules had a broken heart; Lilly needed a career change. Mine were a happy mix of all of these.

  For a while things had a dingy cheeriness. Jules bought a piano and wheeled it into the lounge room. Someone’s cousin donated some furniture and at night Darce and Jules would stay up late drinking and writing songs, breaking up old chairs we found in the backyard for firewood. One night we got drunk and Darcy painted a 3-metre-high portrait of Miles Davis on the wall. That’s a fucking great idea! I thought, and we painted every wall in the house with a portrait of a different jazz musician.

  It was a little bit Kerouac and a little bit Dickens. If I tried hard enough I could pretend it was all an adventure rather than a desperate last-ditch attempt to rebuild my life. The bo
ys called the place ‘the Dog Pound’, which eventually just became the Pound. We didn’t have the energy to keep prefacing ‘pound’ with ‘dog’; we needed every calorie we could get to maintain body heat.

  It was a dark time. Winter settled over the Pound. The front door had been ripped off its hinges so the wind whipped through the house. If I went to sleep with a glass of water by the bed, it would be iced over in the morning. The fraying, frostbitten bohemia kindled a sense of nostalgia for my childhood at Labassa, but nostalgia wouldn’t keep me warm.

  During the day I sat by the fire, and at night I slept underneath a doona and a pile of coats on top of a futon. I was luxuriating in my wretchedness. I wanted anyone who happened to walk by to know that I was a broken man. Looking back, I guess it was an instinctive effort to get someone to notice and take care of me. I remember bringing a woman I’d been seeing back to my house. She looked around in amazement before telling me, ‘I can’t believe you would bring a girl here! What’s wrong with you?’

  As it happens, there is a certain kind who finds a truly broken person irresistible. For a couple of years my whole game was to corner women, dump the bleeding stump of my heart on the table and make keening noises until they tried to fix it. Each party I went to would end in a contest of one-upmanship with someone sporting prison tatts about who’d had the shittier life, and eventually we would just sleep together. A lot of these women were very sweet: retired junkies, gaolbirds, survivors of broken homes. If someone tells you they ‘had a rough childhood’, what they really mean is that they are ‘good in bed’.

  Around that time a shrink I sometimes scored weed for convinced me that my problems with substances were the result of trauma-related intimacy issues. ‘Think how much time and energy you put into these quick-fix solutions: alcohol, cocaine. What is it that you think you’re searching for? Think how different your life would be if instead of chasing these brief highs, you put your energy into building relationships.’

  She’s right! I thought. I can fuck my way right out of this mess!

  There’s a comfort in strange skin, in feeding a hunger that is mindless and endless, so I started sleeping around in earnest. What followed was a confusion of relationships that stacked and overlapped and failed. I started reaching out to people the way I did to bottles and powders. At the right time, as the night threatens to break into horrible dawn, a kiss is as good as a crack pipe.

  Of course, that isn’t a particularly wholesome way to live. Before long the whole concept of sex had divorced itself from intimacy and soured into something more utilitarian. Whenever I met a potential new partner, I must have looked like a human being receptive enough to the idea of a proper relationship, but in terms of emotional intelligence I was a neutered dog begging under the table for scraps.

  My drug abuse and my womanising exacerbated each other. When I had coke I was – in my own eyes at least – charming and sparkling, the life of the party, and when I didn’t I was morose and withdrawn. Often I would meet someone nice at a bar and invite them home, only to degenerate from an excitable, eager-to-please lad into a twitchy, sullen Gollum in the space of a taxi ride.

  Coke made me feel alive, heightened every sense, leaving my skin tingling with bacchanalian pleasure, at least for the first few lines. One of the problems with coke is that it floods you with dopamine, taking away all your fear, doubt and any concept of limitations. If you look at brain scans of people staring into the eyes of their true loves, or mothers holding their newborns, they bear a startling similarity to those of people under the influence of cocaine. That’s why coke is the drug of choice for movie stars, footy players, politicians, anyone with skewed morality and an underdeveloped sense of self. Coke is like a hug for big babies.

  The blast of dopamine given by even the most stepped-on, adulterated powder makes you feel superhuman long after you’ve been physically reduced to a grey-skinned, mumbling, jaw-grinding troll. The disconnection between the inside and the outside of a coke binge is remarkable. Once you’ve passed a certain threshold, for example, you can’t think of anything much except sex, even as your body goes into extremis. By the end of a long day on the powder, you have as much chance of banishing sexual thoughts as you do achieving an erection. I can’t tell you how many evenings I spent crouched over some poor lady, full of sound and fury, whispering sweet, sexy nothings, wanking furiously, completely impotent.

  It wouldn’t have taken a genius to work out I wasn’t ready for a relationship. A simple blood test could have said as much. I’d always been a little frayed at the edges, but now I was in the throes of a pounding drug psychosis and unravelling fast, all while using the affections of women who deserved better as novelty Band-Aids, desperately plastered over the gaping deficit in my humanity. Take a man whose moral fibre is threadbare, find a seam and pull, and you’ve got a pretty good look at me back in those days.

  When someone I was seeing asked me to be their boyfriend I would always say yes, but I would never stop sleeping with other people. Instead I would lie. At one point I was seeing six different women at once. To my coke-addled mind it seemed easier to juggle them than to break up with any of them. To make things more manageable, I’d give them all the same pet name – ‘Honey’, or something like that – then bulk message them from my Nokia. Typically, I would wake up at one woman’s house, have brunch at another’s, and then head off for an afternoon nap at a third’s, and so on. I was unscrupulous, not just in how I treated these women but also in the way I fixated on how they could help me.

  At the time I couldn’t see that what I was doing was wrong. Or, rather, I knew I was making mistakes, that my actions were inexcusable – I just didn’t care. You have to be careful when you live a lie that it doesn’t become too easy. Lying is like drinking. Once you have the hang of a double life, it’s really not that much harder to make it a triple, or a quintuple.

  When I was high it didn’t occur to me that promiscuity could have a downside. If I’d been just a little honest, just a little decent in my dealings with people, then it might have been different. I still had a lot of fun, though. Whenever I see a movie that tries to portray the grittiness of addiction with a clumsy, raw sex scene, I can’t help but feel they’re missing the point. Those clumsy, raw sex scenes were the greatest. Sex and drugs go together like rock and roll and drugs. Or the night sky and drugs. Or screensavers. Or pretty much anything with drugs. Anyone who has served as a coke tray for two women, one blonde and kind-hearted, the other dark and competitive, has no cause to complain about the hand life has dealt them.

  The real tragedy of addiction is what you steal from other people. I don’t mean money, or property, or drugs – although I stole plenty of each to keep up my habit – it’s the time. An addiction will use up your time, years of your life that you will never get back. And it steals time from those who care for you. I know plenty of people who could enjoy a cheeky evening on the old crack pipe with next to no consequences, and that’s fine. I could never manage that. For years I thought that I could carry my madness around and keep it a secret, unaware that it was plain to see, that the people I thought were buying my act when I lied and cheated weren’t idiots – they just cared for me. I abused their trust, disavowed their love and, worst of all, stole their time, wasted their days. Whether it was a couple of months or a couple of years, each of those people deserved better.

  In the end, it wasn’t creeping maturity, or bitter consequence, nor a wrathful God or woman that brought my sleeping around to an end, but that old chestnut, anxiety. Idly browsing the internet before bed, I read a story about a sex addict who’d been infected with HIV via a blow job from a rent boy with bleeding gums. At the end of the article, I said to myself, Isn’t that interesting. I didn’t know you could catch HIV while getting head, then I put on my pyjamas, fixed myself a cup of chamomile tea, turned in and woke up screaming.

  I’d had pretty good luck with STIs in the past. Despite my promiscuity, I’d more or less escaped incurable ve
nereal complaints. Now, though, convinced I had contracted HIV in at least a dozen places, I went to the doctor to have myself checked. I described exactly what had happened and he told me he would run some blood tests, but that it was almost inconceivable I would have HIV. It was more likely I was having a panic attack.

  ‘Liam, is there any kind of traumatic past event that you may not have dealt with fully yet?’

  ‘No. Not that I can think of.’

  ‘Would you be open to the idea of seeing a psychologist?’

  ‘. . .’

  ‘Or I could write you a prescription for something that would —’

  ‘Yes, please. I’ll take the pills.’

  He sent me home with a clean bill of health and a bottle of Valium.

  Then about a month later I noticed something as I was drying myself off after a shower. Despite my half-arsed spiritualist upbringing, I still have a classically Catholic relationship with my body, which means that, except for the occasions when I’m masturbating and crying shamefully, I like to ignore it. When bathing, I’ll give myself a once-over to check that I’m not sporting any major wounds, then quickly dress and leave the Cartesian duopoly to the experts. This time, however, I spotted that something was wrong with my penis.

  On its surface were tiny red sores: angry little craters spaced out on the lunar whiteness of my manhood. With my foreskin pulled back in my chilly bathroom, my little Liam looked for all the world like the Super Mario mushroom. I freaked out and reached my GP’s surgery in record time, my hair still wet from the shower.

  The GP, a true professional and one of the finest physicians I’ve found in the kind of ‘hot chocolate in the vending machine and knife wounds in the waiting room’ bulk-billing clinics I frequented, saw the state I was in and ushered me through without hesitation. He donned gloves and took the offending article between thumb and forefinger and played with it briefly, rolling it between his digits as though it were a lump of blue-vein cheese from a fromagerie he didn’t quite trust. ‘Yes,’ he sighed at last. ‘You have molluscum contagiosum. It’s a localised viral infection.’