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

Work and Home

I live near a hospital, and there's a weird acoustic flaw where people standing and talking at street level across the road sound like they're having a conversation in my bedroom. As I spend quite a bit of time working from home, I hear quite a few of these little chats. What I mainly hear is people being comforted. I generally don't understand what is actually happening, as people have an incomprehensible tendency to never refer directly to what they're talking about, especially if it's important – a thing I don't think I will ever understand. Cancer, death – all horrific pain – is referred to as 'it', if at all. Sometimes, I'll pop my head out over the balcony and have a look. It's a deeply unattractive aspect of humanity, but whenever I encounter tragedy I have to see if the sufferers are beautiful, dumpy, misshapen, stylish, rich or poor, for no other reason than to project backstory onto their pain for my own private entertainment.

It's not just a hospital, there's also a methadone clinic and rehab as well. This means that I'm far from starved for entertainment. There was one night where a woman was screaming "Don't!" and "Stop it!" over and over again. I initially didn't want to do anything about that, not wishing to interrupt my highly important business of watching people fall over on Youtube. But this hesitation didn't last for more than a few seconds, so I went downstairs. At my appearance, the man who had been beating her ran away, and when I went to help the woman up, she screamed, "Don't fucking touch me!" and started screaming even more. So I went back upstairs and watched a video of people wiping out on waterslides.

The conversation I probably hear most often is people haggling furiously over prescription drugs. The price for Valium seems to be anywhere between one and four dollars per pill, depending on bulk, with good character, constant willingness to 'shout a shot', and length of relationship being the principle reasons given in favour of discounts. These conversations also often degenerate into violence, but I never feel even slightly inclined to get involved in those. Nor am I much interested in the occasional ice tantrum, usually involving one of those women who look like they're made of op shop leather storming down the street screaming imprecations at the tops of their voices.

One of the more interesting episodes involves a gigantic man with scars all over his forearms. He looks exactly like a GI Joe action figure, haircut and all. He's always humping a pack, always dressed in black, and always, always smoking. I would see him around the neighbourhood, looking like an action hero whose puppy had just died, smoking and generally staring glumly at the world passing him by. In my mind I called him 'The Happy Welder', partly because of the nature of the scars on his forearms, but mostly from an innate cruelty which I think I share with our entire poxy species.

Anyway, one day he happened to be standing in that spot over the road, so I went out to have a cigarette on my own balcony. He was visiting the rehab, standing outside and having a smoke with his case worker. He assured this man that things were going well. There were good prospects that he might get housing in the next year, and he hadn't attempted suicide in months.

These are the stories I observe on my street, before I head into the neighbourhood where I work and listen to conversations about which restaurants are new, and which are getting a bit tired, how unbelievable Tracy was at the last yoga class, and just how exciting and satisfying some new data centre project is. The distance between these two areas is roughly two and a half kilometres.

Marking Time

I went to a raspberry farm once. It was in Tasmania, and was billed as the thing to go and see. In fact, it was represented to me as a thing to do, which would put it in the same category as writing a novel, having a jousting tournament with shopping trolleys, or walking long distances in the bush. A thing to 'do'.

When I got there, I found it surprising in several ways. First of all was the revelation that a raspberry farm looks like a vineyard, or a tea plantation, or like any other vaguely green space full of commercial agriculture. I am an urban creature, and that's really all I got from looking out at the neat green rows of what I presumed to be raspberry bushes.

The next surprise was the sheer number of things people are willing to put raspberries in. We went to a very nicely outfitted cafe/restaurant/gift shop type thing, where a six page menu contained an astonishing variety of dishes containing raspberries. There were pancakes and whatnot, as you'd expect, but also incongruous combinations, like a bacon and egg breakfast with, for no discernable reason, a raspberry compote. And even more intriguingly, a short list of items having nothing to do with raspberries, proof positive, I think, that the people running the place were well aware that they would be faced with people unwilling to tolerate their berry based whimsy.

But the most surprising thing of all, from my point of view, was the idea that going to a raspberry farm in order to eat a weirdly berried meal and look at some bushes constituted 'something to do'. I remember the person I was with stating that it was 'a bit of fun', and looking back, I think she did have quite a lot of fun watching me go from bewildered to nonplussed to irate. I can't help but wonder if that was her plan all along.

I wouldn't say it was a wasted experience, though. I did enjoy my breakfast, and I learnt several interesting facts about raspberries, though I think I may have forgotten most of them. But I also learned an invaluable lesson about people. Such activities have always been a complete mystery to me. I've always been vaguely aware that there are people for whom life consists solely of eating painstakingly made things in odd or new locations, but I always assumed that there must be some secret thrill to the whole thing. That in the same way I don't really understand people who are addicted to mindless MMOs or Valium or whatever, that there must be some intense pleasure or satisfaction to be gained from this mode of life. The biggest surprise of the day was that there isn't.

These people are just marking time, and doing it (usually in grim silence) in the company of their loved ones. And this makes me wonder about what we all do in our sophisticated urban environments. All those brunches and craft beers, our manufactured enthusiasms for manufactured trends and products - surely this is just a delusional version of going to the raspberry farm. It's all just as poorly qualified to be thought of as 'something to do', but because it's new and bright and colourful, and because we do it loudly and quickly, we deceive ourselves into thinking otherwise.

The Downside of Adventure

It was two o'clock in the morning and a couple of decades ago when I responded to an infomercial advertising Private Investigation licenses. I called the 1800 number, got sent a bunch of course materials which I filled out basically at random, and received a license. What followed was a weird and disconnected set of adventures which taught me quite a bit of unpleasant stuff about human beings.

Most of it was me turning down surveillance jobs (I have always hated surveillance), or doing 'skip traces', which is where you find an address for somebody who's skipped out on rent or debts. But every now and then you'd get a weird one. I once got commissioned to find a girl who had disappeared from her family home. I initially recommended that they call the police, but they didn't want to for some reason. I mainly took the job because they cried at me a lot, and I was young and stupid back then.

It wasn't very hard. They gave me a list of phone numbers for her friends, and a couple of calls led me to a notorious heroin dealer who was known for his habit of building a harem of underage girls. I found his address by pretending to be a customer, visited to establish that she was there, put in my expenses, and made a report. The family then re-hired me to extract her, which was yet another job I should not have taken under any circumstances, but there was more crying, so I ignored my serious qualms about the parents' continuing refusal to call the police and took their money in advance. It's not much of an excuse, but I was also behind on my rent at this time.

So, I subcontracted a couple of my largest and angriest acquaintances and we lobbed up at the house only to find that this girl would basically go along with anyone who asked her to, and that the people in the house simply didn't give a toss. After a little while, she realised we were going to her family home and completely lost her mind. Turns out she had very firm reasons for leaving home. And that was us, on the horns of a dilemma.

I'd like to say that I did something virtuous and wise, but I didn't. I was young and dumb, so after politely refusing her offer to be a live-in girlfriend for one or all of us, we gave her all the loose money we had and dropped her off outside a bar somewhere, as per her request. As for her parents, I felt justified in taking their money and never speaking to them again.

The point of this grubby, depressing little story is that a life of adventure is not exactly a grand sweet song of new experiences and zany characters. I often encounter people who express varying degrees of envy for some of the stuff I've been and done, but I wonder if they're aware of just how much I'd prefer not to have filthy memories like this one. Or how much I envy their view of humanity, untainted as it is by real-life experience of the moral repugnance and evil that lies deep in the hearts of so many of us. And I wonder, as well, how I can so enjoy exactly the same qualities when filtered through the medium of Raymond Chandler prose, but not so much when it's happening in front of me in the real world.

Which leads me to a point which might seem completely random and unrelated, but bear with me. An aspect of this not very nice episode is the problem I have with reality television. Shows like Married at First Sight, or The Bachelor, are frankly disgusting to me, largely because I never lose sight of that line between fiction and reality. The fact of shows like this is that they allow people do delight in the suffering of others, to eviscerate, condemn, and judge, all through what seems to be a filter of entertainment, but isn't. These are real people. It's irrelevant that they volunteer - this fact should actually increase our compassion for their psychological frailty, but it doesn't for most. It's just another reason to sneer at them.

And worst of all, it's dishonest. The specious veil of 'television' provides sadistic thrills for the timid, bloodless violence for the squeamish, and psychosexual horror porn for those too cowardly to face the need for such in their own minds. Of course, that's not everyone. I suspect quite a lot of viewers are just too dim or too blinkered to see these shows as anything but some kind of amateur soap opera.

Well, it's not. All comedy and drama are the enjoyment of the trauma of others at a distance. That principle being true, the only morally acceptable comedy and drama are fictional.

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?