by Liam Pieper
‘What?’ I squealed. At this point I would like to state that I normally take bad news with rugged stoicism, but I’d never had an STI before. Besides, the doctor was rubbing my testicles. ‘What does that mean? Did I catch it from sex?’
‘No, no,’ he laughed, which reassured me, although customarily I’m down on people laughing while touching my junk. ‘This rarely presents as an infection of the genitals. Normally it affects other areas. In fact, I’ve never seen a man’s genitals infected. It is highly infectious and spread by touch, but usually this illness affects children between ages one and ten, who get it on their hands. If you’d like me to talk to your partner —’ I cut him off with a polite no, and he went on to explain that the infection was easy to treat, by burning each of the 36-odd lesions with dry ice, and then scraping the blisters off with a blade.
He worked quickly, but it was still a long, long process. At the slightest touch of scalpel or icy cotton swab, my penis contracted, shrivelling into a pensive acorn. To get between the wrinkles, the doctor had to stimulate the glans until the shaft became turgid – the kind of rubbery half-mast erection common to the nervous and the drunk, a swan’s neck rising from the lake. I lay back while the doctor performed his medical-grade hand job, stopping every once in a while to hack away at me with ice and steel. To pass the time we made small talk.
‘So . . . do you read?’
‘Not really . . . Do you like footy?’
‘No. I don’t mind soccer though.’
‘Don’t watch soccer. Bunch of wankers if you ask me,’ said the doctor, jerking me off. He took a break to refresh his dry ice, which gave me the chance to thaw. I started to feel bad for myself, and for the first time I regretted having slept around so much. I’d always been quietly (read: loudly) proud of my sexual prowess. Now, lying shrivelled in the doctor’s palm, my dick looked like an abandoned yum cha dish.
Then, at long last, it was done. The doctor walked me out and I shook his hand gingerly at the door. He wished me well and added, ‘You might want to keep it in your pants for a while. I mean, that’s not my professional opinion. It’s just good advice.’
Good advice, like good intentions, meant precisely fuck-all to me at the time. What I needed was to stop acting on the crashing, disastrous orders my brain had been dishing out for the past decade, but that’s not what I wanted. I didn’t want to be sober, I wanted to be anything but, and I had surrounded myself with people who would help me to do that. At the age of twenty-five, I was spending my time with anyone who could get me high. I was long past caring about who they were or what kind of damage we were doing to one another. Apart from those who had been foolish enough to move in with me, my real friends were all gone by now, tired of my shit. The times we’d shared and the memories we’d built were left on the cutting-room floor as I edited my life into a version that let me get on with wasting it.
16
I first met the Artist on the balcony of my drug dealer’s apartment. It was the middle of a particularly brutal Melbourne winter. She’d just moved to the city and was huddled inside her coat, shivering. We were seventeen storeys up and our breaths frosted in the air as we spoke, before being whipped away by the bitter winds that stole across the skyline, and we decided we should be friends.
A few months down the line, she called me. It was about 10 p.m. and I was in bed reading when the phone went.
‘Liam! Thank God you’re awake! We’re having a party. Can you come over?’
‘Sure.’
‘Can you bring a friend?’
‘Our mutual friend?’ This was code, clearly. ‘Friend’ was shorthand for ‘bag of drugs’ in our impenetrable argot. Take that, Navajo code talkers.
‘Yes, please.’ I heard her take the phone away from her ear and parts of a muffled conversation at the other end. ‘Actually, better make that a few friends.’
I didn’t have any coke lying around. After my breakdown over the phantom AIDS, I was doing my best to follow doctor’s orders, keeping my belt fastened and my nose clean. This meant staying home and out of trouble as often as possible.
I wasn’t sober by any means, but I just couldn’t afford to get high any more, in both an existential and financial sense. I was properly broke. To make ends meet I was writing shitty editorials and working in kitchens, and still I was coming up short. Every few weeks I would traipse into Cash Converters with a piece of jewellery or an appliance that a client had fenced to me back when I still sold drugs. For a $500 silver chain I’d acquired years ago, I might get $60. If I asked for more, they would shrug and tell me to try to sell it on eBay – ‘Unless you don’t think that’s a good idea,’ they would add, with a big shit-stained grin. The one thing that being wretched teaches you is that there will always be someone willing to grind you deeper into the dirt.
Even though I was broke, I had another option that night. As unfit for any responsibility as I was, due to the family connection, I was still the contact between the house and our landlord. That meant all the other housemates paid their rent to me each week, and at the end of the month I would drive over to my aunt’s house to pay her the money. Now, all that cash was just sitting there, depreciating, and I didn’t see the problem with taking a little on loan.
I went to score for the Artist: I wasn’t doing anything else, and the sycophant in me was excited to hang out with a semi-celebrity. Unsure how much she would need, I got about two and a half grand’s worth, mostly on credit. I figured I would sell the Artist what she needed and offload the rest to friends, or snort it myself if I could find the cash. Before I saw my dealer I made a call to my buddy Doctor Paul, who I sometimes helped score in exchange for a taste, to see if he wanted anything. He asked me to save him a gram, so I had the dealer bag that up separately, and I tucked it away in my wallet.
The Artist opened the door to her house and greeted me with a warm hug, the kind where the hugger relaxes into it so they’re left hanging off your neck like a stole. She was sozzled from drinking with her housemates all day and she introduced me to them in a stream-of-consciousness monologue.
‘This is Liam! He’s a writer! An amazing writer! You absolutely have to read everything he’s ever written. Do you want a drink, Liam? You can have anything you like, as long as it’s gin.’
The Artist led me to a cramped kitchen, where chairs jostled for a place at a table groaning under bottles of gin and mugs full of soft drink. She poured a fifth of a bottle into a tumbler for me, then dropped in an ice cube. We started drinking. I sold her two grams, and for the next six hours we went line for line from our bags, and talked and talked and talked about ourselves, the way only two narcissists can.
We spoke about art and love and the nebulous lines between the two and exchanged notes on how neither of us could hold down a relationship.
‘My boy is perfectly fine, but he needs someone who can be his “Pizza and a DVD girl” and that’s not me. I’m “The Artist”.’ She sighed. ‘I guess sometimes you can’t help but fuck up a perfect thing.’
‘I know!’ I grinned. ‘I’ve followed your career.’ Oh, cocaine: would this champagne existence, this sparkling repartee never end?
The Artist punched me in the arm and called me a bad word, then continued: ‘An artist needs to be with another artist. We’re going to feel things more fully, with greater strength than other people.’ She reached out and gripped my forearm with a sweaty hand. Her eyes were full and round, like a Tim Burton character. ‘Michelangelo didn’t see a lump of marble, he saw a statue. Where everyone else in Florence saw a lump of rock, he saw David inside, and would chip away at it until he’d freed the artwork. That’s what we do. I can see the shape inside the marble. That’s why I like you, Liam. Because you can see inside the marble as well.’
‘My God,’ I said, gripping her hand, eyes filling with grateful tears. ‘That’s so true! Thank you!’
‘Wait here! I want to give you something!’ She stood up and left the room abruptly. I heard her sniffing
and rummaging around in the next room, before returning with a piece of card and a sharpie. She handed it to me with a flourish, pressing it into my hands. I looked at what she’d written: To Liam, find it in the marble, signed with a flourish of x’s and o’s and a looping autograph.
I bunched up my sleeve to wipe my eyes, and my nose, which was bleeding. ‘Thank you. It’s beautiful.’ I put it down on the table and promptly forgot that it existed.
We kept getting high until the yard outside the kitchen window was flooded with weak sunlight. I went to the toilet and when I came back the Artist was on her feet, smoking a cigarette and pacing back and forth.
‘You have to go,’ she told me abruptly. ‘I have to get some sleep.’ I was a little hurt to be turfed out so suddenly, as I was sure that I’d found my soul mate in the past sweaty hours, but I gathered up my coat and keys in a rush as she shooed me down the hallway, her hands pushing at the small of my back. I stood blinking in the chilly dawn, then drove slowly home, stopping on the way at Doctor Paul’s to deliver his gram.
Doctor Paul worked a high-pressure job, spending his days and nights bringing people back to life with a defibrillator, and he had the fatalistic sense of humour that comes with that job. He liked to unwind after a long night of people dying on his trolley by snorting coke, smoking cigarettes and playing Xbox. He’d just returned from a night shift when I turned up. He welcomed me into his lounge room, where I collapsed into his couch, a capacious leather monster.
‘Liam, mate,’ he said, looking concerned. ‘Are you all right? You look like shit.’
‘I’m fine, just tired,’ I slurred, opening my wallet to flip him his bag. He opened it and tapped some out onto his coffee table.
‘Do you want a line?’
‘I’m not sure that’s a great idea.’ My teeth were grinding like teenagers at a blue-light disco, and I was having trouble keeping my train of thought. ‘My heart is all aflutter.’
‘Relax! I’m a doctor. This is the best possible place for you to have a heart attack. I’m pretty sure it would be covered by my insurance.’ He cut a couple of lines with his credit card. I smiled.
‘Oh, go on then. I guess I’ll get a second opinion later on.’
An hour later I was back home, taking inventory. I counted my cash and cigarettes out onto my desk, lit one of the latter and put it between my lips. I had the creeping regret that came after a night of drug abuse, that mental tally of time lost and money spent. Part of it was the suspicion that I’d shouted the Artist way too much of the coke I’d got from my dealer. I reached into my coat pocket to retrieve the bag and came up empty. It was gone. I tore off my coat and went through all my pockets with rising panic. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t in my jeans. It wasn’t in my car. I’d lost it. Shit, shit, shit!
My mind was thick with booze and fatigue, but I could still do the sums in my head. I had the cash in my wallet that the Artist and Doctor Paul had given me, which barely even started to cover the full sum I owed. The dealer and I were friendly, but that wouldn’t stop him headbutting me into a salty marmalade if I couldn’t pay him back. However I ran the maths, if I couldn’t find the bag, I was doomed.
I turned my room upside down with no luck. It occurred to me that perhaps I’d left it at the Artist’s house. Her phone rang out once, and again. I was almost hyperventilating by this point and went through the pockets of my coat again. This time I noticed a tiny hole at the bottom of the breast pocket and my heart leaped. Using my flick-knife, I cut the lining and when the knife snagged on a seam, I tore the coat to rags with my hands. Nothing.
Still panicking, I jumped into my car and drove back to the Artist’s house, so wasted I had to keep one eye closed to stop the double vision long enough to work out which tram to swerve around. I pulled up out the front of the house just as a storm broke. In jeans and a T-shirt I scurried around the kerb and alleyway that bordered the house, hoping I’d dropped the bag en route to my car. I was sweating despite the icy drizzle, and as I fell to my hands and knees to peer into a storm drain, a commuter on her way to work crossed the road to avoid me. I stared at her suspiciously, suddenly convinced that she had found my bag and was now hurrying away from me with eyes averted because she wanted to keep my gear.
A light flickered in the front room of the Artist’s house. I knocked gently, then more insistently. Eventually, a sleepy-eyed housemate opened the door. I muttered something about leaving my phone behind and pushed past him into the lounge room. He went back to bed. The lounge room was empty but I could hear the shower running in the adjacent bathroom. While I waited for the Artist, I ransacked the room, checking under cushions, getting down and lifting up the corners of all the furniture to check underneath them. When the Artist came out of the shower wearing a towel, she screamed.
‘Fuck! You scared the shit out of me. What are you doing here?’
I mumbled an apology and stuttered something about how I couldn’t find my bag of drugs. She relaxed visibly. ‘Oh no! That’s awful.’ She put a reassuring hand on my arm. ‘I got your message and I’ve looked everywhere, but it’s not here.’ She steered me towards the door. ‘If it turns up, I’ll call you straight away, but right now I have to get to bed.’
She spoke firmly but gently, like a kindly schoolteacher might to a kid who’d shit his pants during sport. I mumbled more apologies and got into my car, almost weeping with frustration. I banged the steering wheel with the flat of my hand, hoping to spur my thoughts. Where was it? ‘Think!’ Bang! ‘Think!’ Bang! Then, all of a sudden, I realised where my bag was.
Doctor Paul was smiling when he answered the door.
‘Liam! Mate! How are you? Everything okay?’
On the drive over, I’d rehearsed how it would go. I would settle in and gently coax a confession from Paul about how he’d nicked my bag, and he would then hand it back. If he’d already used it all, I would take cash. I would forgive him and everything would work out fine.
However, when he answered the door, grinning and high, one of the few gears still turning in my mind slipped and I pounced on him, reaching for his throat and settling for his collar. We toppled into the apartment, landing heavily on his couch.
‘Oi!’ he protested. ‘What the fuck, Liam?’
I grabbed spastically at his head. There’s a pressure point somewhere towards the back of the head where you can squeeze a nerve off and incapacitate your opponent with blinding pain, but I couldn’t remember where it was just at that minute. Behind the ears? I poked at his skull while screaming, ‘Where’s the coke, Pauly?’ until he battered me on the side of my head with his palm, which made me let go and roll off him. We both got to our feet, puffing and spluttering.
‘There’s your fucking coke!’ Paul spat, pointing at the table. I looked over to where a few lines were ruled out with a surgeon’s precision, a rolled-up $50 note next to them.
‘Where’s the rest of it?’
‘Where do you think?’
I took that for a confession. ‘Pauly, if you’ve taken my drugs, then I need money, two thousand, right now.’
Paul’s eyes flicked across my face, taking in my twitching features, my dilated eyes, down to where the blood was pulsing through the veins in my neck. He spoke very slowly. ‘Okay, Liam. You’re clearly having some kind of trouble. That’s okay. Do you want money?’ He raised his finger to point across the room. ‘My wallet is on that bench. You’ll find cash inside. Take whatever you want and come back tomorrow if you need more. Okay?’
I looked at the bench, then back at him, expecting a trick, for him to rush me the second I turned my back. I edged towards the wallet, which held a handful of green and gold notes. I stuffed them all into my pocket and then flung the wallet at Paul.
‘Thanks,’ I said simply, and left. I closed the door behind me and stood counting the cash. It was a lot of money, but it wasn’t nearly enough. I was debating whether to go back in when Paul spoke through the door.
‘You’re having some kind of ep
isode, mate. You need to go home. Take a taxi and go straight home. Get some sleep and call me in the afternoon. You can have more money then. Otherwise I’m going to have to call the police, and nobody wants that.’
Back at home I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep that lasted until 10 p.m. the next night, when I woke with my head pounding and my pillow drenched in sweat and blood. I got a beer from the fridge and took stock of my situation.
In the mirror I looked like something created by a particularly untalented life-drawing student, my features warped and dented out of proportion. My skin was stretched tight over my cheekbones, but the flesh above them couched my eyes in puffy folds. One side of my head was grazed and starting to bruise an angry purple from where I’d connected with the coffee table during my scuffle with the doctor. I didn’t do at all well in that fight; all my hard-earned teenaged muscle had wasted away. I was somehow emaciated and bloated at the same time, lacking both physical resources and mental agility. Dried blood caked my face from a couple of smaller cuts and an ugly red trickle dripped from my long-suffering septum. I blew my nose and the tissue came away trailing ropey strands of blood, mucus and cutting powder.
I was a paragon of health, though, next to my finances. Losing the bag had rendered me not only broke but in debt to the housemates I’d inadvertently robbed, and to my dealer, a lovely chap to be sure, but one not known for his understanding when it came to fiscal insolvency.
I considered going to confront the doctor again, but I couldn’t see myself getting past security in his expensive, gated apartment complex and, besides, I didn’t really want to. Paul was a gentleman, and, now that I was sober, I couldn’t really believe that he’d stolen from me after all. I retraced my steps and realised my memories were staccato, punctuated by blackout jags of hours at a time. Realistically, I had to face that I was never going to see that coke again.