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

Strange, Unhappy People

Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Barry is a poet. He used to be a bare knuckle street fighter, slugging it out for a pittance in the car parks of pubs, most of which were shut down long ago as raucously violent blots on the community. The world in which he grew up is long, long gone - the robust, optimistic, mono-cultural blur of the eighties. It seems he hasn't really noticed, though, because his focus has turned almost entirely inward, as it always will when your whole life becomes a process of getting, using and then getting more drugs.

For the past few years now his drug of choice has been methyl amphetamine, otherwise known as 'meth', 'cold' or 'ice'. This isn't something altogether new, though - no victim of the so called 'ice epidemic' is Barry. He's been shooting up heroin, methadone, dextro amphetamine and cocaine for decades. The thing about ice is that it's relatively cheap, in plentiful supply and, taken in toxic psychosis doses, will last for days and days. The other thing about ice, I'm told, is that it appears to have the property of staving off heroin withdrawal sickness. I can't personally verify this, but I have noticed that other background addictions like nicotine simply fade from notice while the ice buzz is on.

In drug-taking circles, Barry's a lifer. He's been around forever, and everyone knows him, so he's plugged into all the little communities of the more serious end of drug subculture. These are many and varied, and on any given day Barry could be hanging out with twenty something homies, ageing hippies, bikies, homeless buskers or middle-class underbelly tourists. It doesn't really matter much who he's with - it's all the same. The community of pipe, and especially of needle, is a strangely unifying one. The distinctions of culture and 'tribe' are all wiped out by the over-riding sense of otherness which comes from the sustained and serious use of any drug, and especially one so heavily stigmatised as ice.

The last time I saw Barry, it was in a drug house in Manly. This house has been raided and shut down for a while now, so I can safely talk about it without compromising or endangering anyone. It was pretty typical of such places - filthy carpets, perpetually blinded windows, walls yellow from tobacco smoke and an absolute bare minimum of battered, donated furniture. At any given time there'll be a handful of men, and maybe one woman, sprawled, hunched, squatting or pacing in various attitudes around the room. Every face is a study in constrained patience, or absent bliss, because it doesn't matter when you rock up at a house like this, everyone has either just received a delivery, or is holding onto themselves as they wait for another one.

In either case, obsessive, repetitive activity becomes deeply satisfying to minds flying on ice. Mobile phone games, assembling or disassembling stolen bike parts, folding paper, flicking through television channels or browsing for porn - it's not important what the activity is, it suddenly becomes the most important thing on the planet. From a distance, if you squint, a room full of ice users can look a bit like a meeting of twitchy mad scientists who have forgotten that they're not alone.

All this tends to change when a new person arrives, assuming that new person brings a fresh element of some kind with them. In Barry's case, he normally sweeps into a house in a hectic wave of energy, beat poetry and beers in brown paper bags which he will share with the house. This is usually guaranteed to start a general conversation. Sure, not everyone will be able to look up from what they're doing, but they'll be listening and contributing. And that's probably the most surprising thing about ice addicts and users. If we're to go with the received image, we could be forgiven for thinking their days are filled with random nihilistic violence, robbery and beating up on their mothers. The reality is, though, that these people spend the vast majority of their time sitting around talking to each other.

One favourite topic for conversation is personal history. A staggering proportion of these people have suffered serious sexual or physical abuse at some point in their lives. As a result, they often have an air of disassociated numbness when it comes to their own selves, and their accounts of their past lives are intricately woven tapestries of fantasy and fact, by turns funny, pathetic, bitter and manic. Like the story Stevo used to tell about the first time he went to jail. He'd been driving a stolen car and had been stopped by the police for some innocuous reason. All was well, and they were about to drive on when his mother, drunk out of her skull, pulled up. While she was in the process of being breathalysed and arrested, she turned to Stevo and loudly pointed out that he did not own the car he was driving.

Conspiracy theories are also practically ubiquitous amongst this set. Weirdly intricate frameworks of power and interest are constructed into a sort of murky, confused world view. The CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, various police forces, banks and governments are co-opted into a narrative whose burden is that the whole world has connived to block them from attaining personal success. Often, their knowledge of the organisations they suspect doesn't go much beyond knowing their names, but that's not really important. The point is that the game is rigged, the power sits with others from whom it cannot be taken, and it makes perfect sense, therefore, that they have opted out of life.

Other than that, they tell funny stories about themselves and each other, bitch and gossip, share Youtube videos and Facebook memes - yes, just like normal people. Because essentially, that's what most of these people are: perfectly normal, damaged and discouraged people. Of course, it can be said that their existence is entirely without meaning. Their whole lives are taken up with nothing beyond the acquisition of money in service of the acquisition of drugs, and they can spend days and days sitting in one stinking room talking nonsense to people they don't really know or like.

But when you think about it, you can't help but wonder just how different that is from any other person's life. We work, save and spend on furniture, holidays, alcohol, over-priced meals, all of which are consumed in the company of people we may not particularly care for, but to whom we hold on because a person is supposed to have friends. While many of us are happy, some of us sublimate our despair with these frivolities, and I simply don't see the difference between that and what a meth junkie does. Except, of course, that the acquisition and consumption of ice is by its very nature criminal, and the people who do it criminals by extension. And then there's also the fact that constant drug use is a much quicker and more visible way to kill oneself than, say, sugar.

Sometimes, when I see an addict twitching down the street shouting at himself, or searching frantically through a bin, I'll recognise someone I've seen in my travels. This forces me to reconcile the insane hobo image I see with the thoughtful, gentle and tortured person I may have spoken to, years ago, when I was on the same trajectory. I think that if everyone had to do this - had to see beyond the dirt and strangeness and into the actual person, they might be less quick with their judgements, and with their dismissal of these people as people. In the words of Palahniuk, "We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world," so who are we, really, to decide which of us is more or less crap than another?