Strange Days

It's one of those depressing overcast days when the weather seems to hesitate frustratingly between fine and stormy without being able to make up its mind. This might explain why Katie is having her third shot of methamphetamine for the day, or it might not.

She's crouched on a milk crate under a rail bridge. Scattered around us are two men and a girl who can't be more than sixteen years old. They're all grubby-faced, like children who have wiped their faces with dirty hands. The other three all watch the progress of Katie's injection with hard, laser-focused eyes. She stabs the needle into a black vein which bumps and knots its way down her forearm. Once it's in, she wiggles it left and right whilst pulling back on the plunger until a tiny dejected plume of dark blood reluctantly flares into the barrel of the syringe. Satisfied, she pushes the plunger home, yanks the needle out, and covers the bleeding puncture wound with a grubby finger. There's no real change in her face or demeanour as the drug hits her system, just a hint of satisfaction in her eyes as its tense lines relax slightly. I'm reminded of the expression of a footsore passenger who has finally found a place to sit down. 

"I'd offer you one," she says, "but I don't have a clean. And you don't look like a tweaker anyway."

"You could offer me one," says one of the men. 

This is Ken, who I think is a partner of sorts for Katie, but this is difficult to determine as Katie is a prostitute and has offered me her services free gratis several times already while Ken was present. 

"Why? You'll just scab it off me anyway," quips Katie. This kicks off a long and circuitous conversation about who supplies more drugs to whom, a dialogue which peaks and troughs in emotional intensity with the regularity of a sine wave. While this is going on, Katie is fiddling with a drug bag which contains just under half a gram of crystal. She's got an old set of pipe-cleaning equipment - the kind with the scoop and probe - and is painstakingly lifting out individual clumps and placing them in the plastic spoon she's just used to mix up her own injection. When she's done, without really breaking the flow of her wrangling with Ken, she looks over at the young girl and says, "There you go, love." It suddenly dawns on me that this girl is her daughter. 

Once this is done, the others come forward with spoons, Ken first, still half-heartedly arguing with her but clearly dividing his attention between her and the specks of rock she's dropping into his outstretched utensil. Katie sees me watching and says, "My kids always come first." The others nod and make sounds of emphatic agreement. I watch them punch their blunt needles through their scar tissue into their veins and then carefully hide their syringes away about their persons.

"You can get done for self-administered, you know," says Ken. "A lot of people don't know that."

He's talking about the fact that it's a criminal offence in NSW to self administer a prohibited substance. The maximum penalties are a fine of up to $2200 or a two year prison sentence. Generally, a user found with a needle or a bong will be charged with this offence and strongly advised by the police to submit a written pleading. This is convenient for the police, being administratively easier, and they will often sell it on the basis that the accused won't have to attend court. The problems with this are that not attending court is a very good way to be sentenced to the maximum penalty in absentia, and that the vast majority of magistrates will not accept the simple presence of paraphernalia as conclusive proof. Some magistrates will even accept addiction as a defence, as there's a provision under the law for necessity or duress. A person with a strong support network and money for representation is most likely to get a caution or community service, but as with many aspects of the criminal justice system, the heaviest penalties tend to fall on the poor and friendless. 

Once they've all had their hits, they become far more talkative. There is a brief period where all of them are talking at once, three of them to me and one to himself. Ken is earnestly telling me a story about being beaten senseless by nightclub bouncers who lost patience while attempting to move him away from their corner. He had elected to meet his dealer there and then his phone had run out of battery. Unable to either explain this, or comply, they had dragged him into a nearby alley and taken turns kicking him in the head. He seems especially upset by the fact that they had referred to him as a junkie the whole time. "I'm not a junkie," he says. "I've never thieved anything in my life." 

Katie is showing me pornographic pictures on her phone and explaining the fine points of how to achieve the sexual positions depicted. "You gotta remember to clench your abs and plant your heels or they'll rip a hole in you," she says. "Men forget themselves in the moment, you know what I mean?" 

Her daughter, whose name I never discovered, is asking me an unbroken stream of questions. She wants to know what music I listen to, what school I went to, if I think she's pretty, what I think of bacon, if I've ever been arrested, what the law is surrounding strip searches - that's the only question she waits to hear the answer to. When I tell her what little I know, she then launches into a long and disjointed story about an illegal strip search she was subjected to at a music festival, concluding multiple times that "all pigs are pervs". 

The other guy, Cameron, stares at the sky and mumbles about finding spirit dragons in buried coffee mugs. "People don't know this stuff, but there's dragons hidden everywhere," he says at the end of every one of his brief vignettes.

"This poor bloke," says Katie eventually, referring to me, "we're all talking at him at once." There's general laughter, and Ken explains that it's not often they meet new people. 

"People avoid you if you look like a user," he says. 

I don't think that's true. My own observation is that beggars and users are basically invisible to passersby. Katie announces that she's got to get on again and invites me to come with her for "a bit of peace and quiet". We wander off down the street at the slow amble that's almost universal amongst the long term homeless. She links arms with me, explaining that she's "holding" and that I look respectable - she wants to use my respectable appearance (I'm dubious about this) as a sort of aegis to avoid being searched or, as she puts it, "verballed" by the police. As we walk, she apologises for her sexualised conversation. 

"I know what it's like," she says."I didn't mean to harass you or anything. It's just I've always used sex to get affection. That's all I want, really - for people to like me and to show me some affection. I know there's other ways, but it's the one I've always gone with. I guess it started with my old man. He started fucking me when I was about nine or ten, him and his mates. It went on for ages, but I was just a kid and I didn't know how to stop it. Eventually, it just became normal for me, you know? Well, not normal - it can never be normal - but I kinda just accepted that that's how to be with men. And it's never gone away."

We reach the corner where she's appointed to meet her dealer, and I take this as an opportune moment to say goodbye. She thanks me for listening and tells me to drop by any time. It's silly, but the fact that this conventional politeness is exactly what one would expect from a middle class housewife strikes me as extremely odd. But of course, why would Katie be any different in this respect? There's no reason at all. 

"Are you sure you don't want a fuck?" she says as I'm walking away. I politely decline. "Yeah, I don't blame you," she says, her hand unconsciously covering the track marks on her forearm. 

Names have been altered at the interviewees' request

On the Importance of Acknowledging Evil

I remember when I was in secondary school I would regularly cut class to go to the George Street Timezone. Whilst there, I met an older Chinese - he was probably in his early twenties - with whom I bonded over Double Dragon and a mutual interest in looking up the skirts of female characters in Street Fighter. I remember during one of our wide-ranging discussions he solemnly advised me against hooking up with a white girlfriend. "They don't see us as human," he said. "We're basically pets to them, or at best, accessories to prove to their foolish mates just how 'advanced' they are."

This idea is, of course, laughable, but I took it as gospel at the time as it does, in fact, have a kernel of truth. Where the truth lies is in essence rather than in detail: the world is a hostile place, and the vast majority of people in it will behave amorally the majority of the time. This might seem controversial, but I don't really think it is. Where people are consciously in control of their behaviour, the majority are moral while a minority are deliberately immoral. But just how much of anyone's behaviour is consistently under their conscious control? For most or all people, it's laughably little - so many of our actions, small and large, are reflexive responses to drives we're either unaware of or do not wish to acknowledge. This being so, it's always been axiomatic for me that people in aggregate represent the most dangerous type of threat - the one which is not cognisant of its status as a threat.

This way of looking at the world was, in my early life at least, pretty well universal amongst all the people I knew. But now, as I reluctantly advance in age and prosperity, I'm more and more coming into contact with people who think very differently and, somewhat more surprisingly for me, fast coming to the conclusion that it's normal to do so, and that my view is the anomalous one. The most prevalent world view I come across these days is one which consists of deliberate and wholly voluntary blindness to evil. It's interesting to me that the division falls roughly across class lines (with me being an obvious anomaly in that respect), and reminds me of Becky Sharp's famous bon mot from Vanity Fair where she muses that she would also find it easy to be "virtuous" on fifty thousand a year.

I don't really have a problem with people wishing to see things in this way, but I do wonder if they're aware of the implications of such a view. There are some crucial assumptions, almost certainly all incorrect, which underpin such a way of being. People who allow their bodies to become soft and dysfunctional in the name of instant gratification are somewhere deep in their minds assuming the invincibility of the civilised order. People who laser focus on their own tiny lives without paying attention to the rest of the world are assuming that history can't touch living individuals in the same way that, say, WWII fatally interrupted the plans and aspirations of millions, many of whom were very clearly caught napping. People who exempt themselves from political process or awareness are possibly making the most stupid assumption of all - that the systems under which we live are somehow natural and native to reality, rather than delicate webs of abstracts requiring constant maintenance and defence. The vulnerabilities created by these deliberate blind spots really do look, from where I'm standing, utterly appalling.

It could be argued that I'm just as skewed as anybody else. That I'm arguing from an equally deluded position located on the paranoid end of the spectrum. I don't think so. I know from personal experience as well as close observation of others that wherever we find within ourselves an area made up of rationalisation or excuses, that that area represents a critical vulnerability - a part of ourselves which can and will be destroyed by the Brownian motion of human interaction, and which might very well facilitate the destruction of the person as a whole. I'm not saying that everyone should work to coat themselves in the invincible armour of isolation - vulnerabilities are not just entry ports for hostile action, but also for the types of human connection which are the only thing that potentially makes the endeavour of human life worthwhile.

But what I am saying is that it's essential to manage one's interface with the world, because the world is as full of danger as it is of wonder, and it's impossible to manage threats of which one is unaware. And should we cease to match and manage ourselves accordingly, we potentially cut ourselves off from the good things in life, it being impossible to really experience anything when dead or broken beyond repair.