The Big Whatever (14 page)

Stan's dope lasted me a week, then zilcho. I knew I was going to run out, obviously. While I was stoned, my plan was to just cop it sweet, get the shit out of my system, carry on without. But day one with no heroin was a drag. No man with the golden arm stuff, understand, just aches and pains, sniffles and deeeeeeep fucking dreariness. Mid-morning I'd
more or less decided to go and score. Yeah, yeah I know what you're thinking – disgusting. Just telling the truth here, little ones. Take it or leave it.

I knew the Captain lived somewhere in Albert Park, but had no idea of his actual address, and no phone number. I rang a couple of people. They didn't know either. Sooner or later I'd see him, no doubt, but for now . . . I went to a house in Prahran whose inhabitants, I knew, sometimes used a little skag. No go. Another in St Kilda. Same. Then I thought, fuck it. That's how it is. Comme ci, comme ça, c'est la vie, semper fidem, and a bunch of other bullshit foreign phrases whose meaning I don't know. It all added up to no hard drugs for Mel.

Something odd happened then. I started thinking it wasn't a big deal, really. Maybe a godsend. I'd been to this point before, and knew I was still well short of a real habit, and I could keep chipping a while longer, but . . . You get my drift. Accept it, move on, go with the flow. Yeah, I could do that. I really could do that.

This was going through my head as I walked down Fitzroy Street, not sure what to do next. Then up ahead I saw Alex the Greek. With Cathy. Standing, talking. Fifty yards away, at the next corner, a ratty looking couple waited, eyes on Cathy. What strange craziness was this? The answer was apparent even from a distance: drug business was being conducted.

Cathy saw me, signalled me over. As soon as I got within earshot and without even a greeting, let alone a word of explanation as to how such an unlikely alliance should have come about, Cathy said, “Got any money?”

I looked from her to Alex, who was looking – fuck me if it wasn't true – ragged and strung out, but at the same time kind of hopeful.

“For what?”

“You know what,” she said.

And in that moment the way forward became
absolutely crystal fucking clear. I gerried: Alex was on the spike. Probably had been in Sydney. Family had sent him down here as his last chance to show them he wasn't a complete fuck-up. Get the money from Mel, settle the vendetta with blood, whatever. Come back with honour. Might have happened, but Alex hadn't quite had the stomach for murder, had given me the benefit of the doubt, and decided to wait for my pipe-dream big score. His offsider Barry had left disgusted – no doubt to report Alex's dereliction to the family. And waiting around Melbourne had been too much for drug-hungry Alex. Cathy had spotted him at the T. F. Much – she'd told me that, but obviously she'd made contact, and quickly dug what was going on.

My guess – keerect as it turned out – was she'd been supplying him with skag. And no doubt levying a good tax for herself. The couple waiting at the corner would be part of it too. Cathy had been getting the stuff from Stan, but now Stan was gone, and she was scrabbling around to buy a cap of powder. Small time. Which meant she didn't know the Captain was the man. Interesting.

“You can score around here?” I said.

“We need some more dough.”

“How much you got?”

“How much have
you
got?”

Fact was, I had plenty. I still had my whack of the post office robbery, most of it. And speed money had been coming in faster than it was going out.

“You're going to score some crappy deal around here? Go ahead.” I shook my head. “I can do
way
better.”

That got their attention.

“Do what you have to do,” I said. “But when you're ready to get serious, come see me.”

Open-mouthed.

“Not today though.” I turned around and sloped off.

I wasn't planning on being the man, exactly. But dig, if there
are drug fiends to your left and a drug supplier to your right, what is to be done? Obvious, right? Oh, don't give me that “God damn the pusher man” bullshit. When it comes to drugs, no one makes no one do nothing, if you catch my drift. There's been more hypocritical crap spoken about “drug peddlers” trading in misery and death, perverting young whatevers, renarda, renarda, renarda, than any topic in the history of the world. Sorry my earnest young truth seekers, but things aren't that simple. They never were.

But I digress. Let me tell you how Mel became the king of the Melbourne pushers.

After a bit more sniffing around Albert Park, I found the Captain living in a semi-swank private hotel. I didn't mention it before, but our paths had crossed many years earlier, in Sydney. Long story, no need to go into it here. Let's just say I knew the Captain was an operator with many a crooked card up his sleeve. And not to be underestimated.

So I simply rolled up unannounced and banged on his door. He was a big fellow in his late 40s, maybe 50s, with a Captain Beefheart moustache. Lank, longish hair. Well dressed – tweeds and bespoke what-have-yous, sometimes a velvet smoking jacket. Soft-spoken, educated accent.

If he was surprised to see me he didn't let on. “Mel, dear fellow,” he said. “Come in and join me in a vodka.” It was two in the afternoon. His flat was okay – leather-covered armchair, Persian rugs, that sort of thing. He lived alone by the look of it.

Straight out with it. “Stan has shot through,” I said. “Jimmy too. This bullshit in the papers. You probably know that already.” No response, yea or nay. “Anyway, Stan told me to get in touch with you if I needed . . . anything.”

“Anything?”

“Well, the Robert Stack, in particular.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“The s
mack
, for chrissake.”

He thought about it a bit.

“How much?”

Quick thinking from your doughty correspondent.

“As much as you can get.”

A slight snicker from the Captain. Meaning either, you're having yourself on. Or, that's
so
much dope, you have no idea what you're asking.

“You've got people who can take it, I gather.”

“Perzackly.”

He considered me for a moment. “None of my business, I realise, and I don't wish to pry, but you, Mel – do you yourself indulge?”

I shook my head. “Have done, but no, this is business.”

He simply said, “All right,” left the room and came back with a tobacco tin. Put it down on the table in front of me.

I opened it. Inside, four neat packages wrapped in clear plastic. Yellowy-beige powder, a little lumpy. Number three heroin, as it was known in the trade (I found out later).

“This isn't the same stuff you've been selling to Stan, is it?”

“Not quite. This is new. Better. Why don't you take one package for now. See how you go with that,” said the Captain.

I picked up a packet.

“Sorry to be the censorious old school marm, Mel, but you must understand, if
you
start using the stuff all bets are off.”

“I dig it.”

I met up with Cathy and Alex the next day. Cathy was very curious about the dope: where I'd got it,
how
I'd got it. She cooked up a taste right in front of me. Added a few drops of vinegar to help break it down. She peered closely at it as the pale powder dissolved. Did the business. Sat back. Sighed. Then she asked me again where I'd got it, very sweetly. But no deal.

I left the package with them. They broke the stuff up into smaller denominations – no doubt diluted somewhat – and took it onto the highways and byways of Melbourne, sold
it to a bunch of people I didn't know. And no doubt some of those people sold it on again, in even more diluted form. So there you have it, my young psychonautical entrepreneurs: heroin dealing. Capitalism in microcosm. Big dividing line there: I didn't use any of the dope. I'd put it behind me. I paid the Captain first thing the following day. He gave me another package.

A few weeks passed like that. With Alex and me, the way it was supposed to be working, we'd keep doing business. I'd get some serious bugs together, enough to clear the debt between us. Meanwhile Alex would earn some bread for himself selling the drugs I was slinging him. What we knew, deep down, but didn't say, was Alex probably wouldn't save a sixpence, because he was a drug fiend. Seems obvious now, but dig, anything to do with drugs is shot through with self-deception and make-believe, and none of the big dreams come true in the end. Almost none. There may be exceptions. I'm just saying.

The summer burned out. Leaves turned from green to brown – no pleasant autumnal jive along the way, just a dusty exhaustion. But my money was piling up, so I was getting Alex paid off. And I still had a sacred duty to perform. A setting-to-rights with my erstwhile business partner. The cat I left in Sydney holding the baby, right? You think I'd forgotten? I knew that sooner or later I'd have to return to Sydney. And there was only one way to do it – with a shitload of money. Pay off, buy off all naysayers and backbiters. Get Johnny out of whatever hole he was in. Hence the nest egg.

Meanwhile, back on the rock'n'roll front, Oracle were kind of successful. Selling a few records. You'd see the name around the place, on posters. Sometimes we were on telly. The big time, right? Forget it. We were barely making a living. From the music, I mean. But dig, music is its own reward right? And the life of the working musician is not a bad way to sell drugs either.

Getting a wider audience meant Oracle lost some of its
old inner-city crowd. People around Carlton had started calling the band “Orifice” – how do you like that? I still did the occasional job with the suburban rock'n'roll fossils, even the odd jazz date too. Kept writing, arranging. Started thinking about writing a jazz-rock opera. Dreaming big dreams, my little ones.

Shit was going swimmingly. Kind of. In a fool's paradise sort of way. But there were hints and forebodings, clouds on the horizon. Certain whispers, foreshadowings. Quite a few, actually. Here's one:

It was a day in late April. A cold wind was blowing off Bass Strait. I was meeting Vic in a Carlton coffee shop, to do a routine drug swap (speed and grass, if you were wondering). We sipped our coffees. A bedraggled kid in a frayed sweater was hanging about outside, glancing back down the street every few moments. A girl there, with a gone-to-seed hippie look. She was, pushing a pram. Dopers. Across the street, someone else was hanging about, not related to them as far as I could tell, but also obviously a doper. Strung out.

Vic and I wandered out of the café, down Lygon Street. We saw more junkies down the block a way. “Is it just this morning,” I asked Vic, “or is
everyone
on the gear?” He shrugged. We did our business, then went our separate ways.

I went home. Let me tell you, little ones, those wall-to-wall drug fiends worried me. I'd always figured that drugs were the keys to the otherwise mostly locked, barred and chained-shut doors of perception. Giving drugs to someone who wanted them was a good and kind act. Everyone thought that. No one begrudged the small earn you might make. But the girl with the pram . . . Led to some deep cogitating by your doughty scribe.

That night I met up with Cathy at the Waiters Club. I aired my thoughts. As usual she was way ahead.

As I told her about the marauding hordes of junkies on
Lygon Street, she shook her head impatiently. “
Yeah
,” she said, “what did you expect?”

I looked at her, waiting.

“It's not what it was, Mel. Maybe it never
was
what it was.”

“What would that be exactly, dear lady, that isn't what it was, exactly?”

“Oh, you and your fifties beatnik thing,” she muttered, with an impatient wave of the hand.

“Steady on, lassie,” I said. “You're waving my whole goddamn life away there.”

She looked at me, smiling and curling her lip at the same time. “Getting
high
on a
reefer
, smoking a little of that
mellow gage
.” She started laughing. “Like crazy, pops! What all the cool
hepcats
are doing.”

“I never—.”

She looked at me levelly. “How many people in Melbourne do you reckon use smack?”

I thought about it. Not long before I'd have said, maybe ten, twenty.

“A hundred? Two?”

She slowly shook her head. “Multiply that by twenty. At least. And it's only just starting.”

“Jesus.”

“Not so hip once everyone's doing it, right?” She grinned. “What's happening now, everyone who comes across the stuff either says, Whoa, and backs the fuck right off. Or else they dive on in. Not that many back off. It's a virus most people catch.” She took a swig of her red wine. “Has a long way to run yet.” She looked away, tilted her head.

“Where does it end?” I asked.

“You tell me.”

“People start getting off the shit. Move to a higher plane. Like Aleistair Crowley says.”