Tag: Addiction

We never did make it…

We never did make it to the Halloween party. Even though I was dressed as Eowyn, and you were dressed as Aragon, and we carried collectors’ swords and you carried a dagger that an elderly Asian lady on the train thought was a Samurai sword. The way we chuckled at her look of disappointment when she realised it was simply a Lord of the Rings dagger.

We never did make it to the Halloween party, and my little voice who sees the truth told me we’d never make it. It said we’d travel the train lines in humid, sweat coated circles, five hours on a Sunday, around and around. Me with my little brain voice and the louder brain voice that sings off-key in a child’s voice, singing for hope.

That is the way of it, the way of us.

There is always alcohol and drugs, and there’s always hope.

Hope that if I keep trying, that I can engage you with the world. Hope that if I only try a bit harder, you won’t need a beer, a Carlton dry long neck sipped from a paper bag at a Western Sydney train station, the Valium, a flutter at the pokies.

We never did make it to the Halloween party.

First date lines

I can tell you that I play the violin, albeit badly. But everyone plays the violin badly until their tenth year of playing. I can also tell you what the inside of a methadone clinic smells like: mildew and urine and cheap caustic soda. Home brand, no matter how private the clinic. I can tell you that such places are great equalizers, with everyone in the queue hovering at the edges of their skin. That some people will take their ‘done and sell it or chase it with ice or steroids.  That others will swallow their dose and let the chemicals hold them, like a slow-release embrace, and they’ll go to work as accountants, or academics or tradies.

What else do you want to know? I can tell you that each Christmas I consider driving to Flagstaff Hill and free falling from the jagged cliffs. But then I think of my calico cat who licks my nostrils every night and my tuxedo cat who enjoys second and sometimes third dinners.  And with this thought I realise that no one else would love them in the same peculiar way.  Instead, every Christmas I drive northwards past the leafy suburbs of Sydney where the self-declared successful people live. And I keep driving, to friends I would call family if only the latter felt like safety.

Anyway, did I tell you I play the violin badly?

I can tell you that I sound like a funeral dirge in the key of D minor, played in the corner of a small-town pub, sung by a tone-deaf Nick Cave/ Joan Baez cover band.

Just letting you know; I’ve been watering your garden.

Just so you know, I’ve been watering your plants all winter. You remember, those plants that you plucked feverishly from Bunnings clearance trays, the seedlings we pilfered from torn plastic planters piled outside for Council pickup,

            remember

before you crept inside your mind and made a nest with your demons.

I’ve been watering your ferns, your monsteras, your Tahitian bridal ivy, your ornamental orange tree that flowers but never bears fruit, and I’ve been watering as an act of ritual,

and what else is such a ritual but

an act of love and

 perhaps an act of resistance?

through that confusing damp, wet, winter where the black mould crept along our concrete walls and the tomato plants flooded despite their adequate drainage,

I watered,

crooked stalks that looked like dandelions but weren’t and plants that were possibly invasive species

or simply just weeds.

Even while you swaddled yourself with weed and booze and spent your days scrolling through doom-scapes [and yes, they would call this enabling]

[the AA, the co-dependency experts]

I’ve been watering your plants

 as ritual,

                                                                        as rebellion,

but I thought you should know about those plants we rescued, the ones wrapped in black plastic with flat angular leaves, the ones we rescued on a hopeful night-

Those plants are blooming.

I think they’re irises.

If I stare at them long enough, they look like silken lilac and gold origami cranes,

gazing up at the lightening sky.

Springtime in D Minor

As all the northern poets pin fall to page, 
you are playing with colour again. Your client
squirts gold onto butcher’s paper like Jackson Pollock 
and the wisteria tresses dangle from rotten 
fence palings and timber eaves. You too 
like to flirt with refraction smearing 
rainbow across your eyes, while the
wattle shakes her ringlets across the motorways. 

His father posts online. Four years since
L’s death date, but he never noticed springtime 
when there was a goon bag behind the Ajax
and Smirnoff behind the curdled milk. You are done 
with half formed motherless men grasping 
at shadows and fainting in the sun so
you ignore the hashtag and make 
vases out of cleanskins,
slipping lavender into wine bottles,
twisting scent into song.

What they don’t tell you

Prose poetry in three movements

What they don’t tell you (movement one)

…is that you’ll be clutching at the edges of life, ripping nails clean from your nail bed, leaving bloodied fingertips too wet to grasp ledges. What they don’t tell you is that it’s a loss, nobody tells you that you’ll rake the fur lined, dust coated carpets for powdered residue, that you’ll sneak into friends’ bedrooms just to hold their prescription Endone in your hands, just because…

because there is hope in the holding.

What they don’t tell you is that instead of poppy seeds, you’ll be downing opened bottles of Jacob’s Creek Chardonnay, three months opened and more vinegar than wine, that you’ll be eating when your body is not hungry, grease drenched burgers and cardboard fries, but that there is more than one type of hunger. And you’ll run by the river, through muddy, waterlogged grass, around and around soccer fields until your knees lock in protest and the lactic acid paralyses your calves.

That when you can no longer run, you will crawl home and lie on your rug weeping, that the weeping will collect in a pool around your foetal form. What they don’t tell you is that sobriety is grief-stricken, a period of mourning.

That gear was a life partner that held you,

and that person is no longer there.

What they don’t tell you (movement two)

….is that your skin will curl and break, that wounds will weep, and an infection will break, that the compulsion to create will seep from your body. Boils will open and pus will leak, and you will write in a way that you have never written,

in between students and clients, on office note pads, with scratchy ballpoint pens, on pizza take away menus and envelopes screaming overdue bills,

you’ll write

in a grasping, clutching way, and you’ll be driven to sound, to rhythm, to the edges of life, that your ears will sharpen to your violin, attune to the hidden notes on that fretless instrument you play. That your ears will recognise that B is shrill, stern like an old school ma’am, that D is resonant but calm, a yogi and

these are moments you don’t crave opiates,

moments of softness or heart, your cat’s paws on your chest for instance, a friend who buys you Thai chilli basil tofu and steamed rice for lunch, and laughter,

yes laughter, untethered.

What they don’t tell you (movement three)

They use the word clean, but that’s a misnomer, as though passing a drug test means your body is free of the impurities and that’s not true,

the body remembers.

cells remember.

And how can they not remember flesh breaking and heart calcifying and a child running to the corners of breathing so nobody can break her further

Flesh and bone hold your own trauma and the cells your parents’ and grandparents’ trauma. And what do you do with this epigenetic fate?

You pick up your violin and play the saddest of scales, D minor, the musical key for dirges and laments until your neighbour bangs on your ceiling and you stop, but the knowledge is there. You’re working out how to live with the library of knowledge trapped in subcutaneous fat, you’re working out how to hold yourself when gear was the only love who knew how to hold you.

ways of holding space

Mark the calendar:

the 29th of August, the day you failed her. After years of trying, imagining yourself a one-woman Marvel multiverse, you have turned out the lights,

and curled as adult foetus, beneath your fur lined, patch work quilt, one hand on your Calico cat who has curled beside you. Another hand on that blood pump other people call a heart.

You will not spend 12 hours in A & E in the bustling inner-city rooms where it is not uncommon to see a half clothed, stale breathed man handcuffed to the bedframe, a uniformed officer at his bed, and neither will you spend 6 hours in the smaller suburban A & E, where traces of blood have not been cleaned beneath hard plastic chairs-

You can no longer hold space for her, though this is your job. Holding space. Leaning in and listening to the themes that reverberate in the pauses and the sentence periods.

Because the way you listen can speak tomes,

listening as echolocation,

as homing device,

I am here, I am here

you are there and I travel beside you,

but tonight, you scream to be the heard, the listen-ee, not the listener,  

instead, you rest your ear against the Calico, letting her breathe softness against your chin, and she shares her purr with you, the vibration that travels through her when she is in her vet carrier, or when the neighbour’s Chihuahua ventures not too close but close enough,

she shares her purr, that self-soothing soft rumble from deep within her larynx,

come, the Calico says,

there are other ways of holding space.

The Ferryman 3: the apprentice

In Greek and Roman mythology, while the Ferryman was charged with transporting the dead to the underworld, occasionally he would transport the living to the underworld and back.

Look at that son. How’d ya be? 10 k lockdown radius and no one can get in or out! It’s like the heroin drought of 2002. There’s no green going around to buy or sell, and the meth comes from the mountains and the south coast. Ha! hard times for a dealer I tell you.

What? Nah, don’t you worry. There’s always customers for me. Get this for a laugh son. Remember last year when the country was on fire? Yeah, well, in those towns surrounded by flames, I had my hands full with people queuing up, not for water and bread and dunny paper but for the bottle-O. Lines down the street, I tell ya, people walkin’ away with trolleys filled with slabs of beer. People’ll always find a way…but…

But, listen. I gotta be straight with you.

It ain’t easy. I know your mum told you to get a trade, have a Plan B if the muso thing don’t work out for ya, but are you sure want to train with me? Yeah, nah, the government gives me a subsidy to take you on, but I want to do right by my nephew.

Yeah, the job has its perks but it’s a hard slog all the same.

What? Ok, yeah. Fair enough. Let me show you the ropes and then you can decide. Yeah, jump on the boat, no time like the present. So, see this river here? This river has different names. Some call it the River Acheron, others call it the River Styx. Don’t care what you call it, this river here is my patch. You just need to remember what it does son.

It divides the living from the dead.

Now that other river…that’s not really my patch. Sometimes a punter will pay a bit more and I’ll share it with that bird Lethe, and she’ll let me go up that river of forgetfulness….

Oi, are you listening to me? Put that bloody phone away and learn something! I don’t care if you’re taking a selfie with that centaur…what? You want to record this on your vlog?  Are you sure people want to watch this?

Really?

Streuth! Back in my day, you’d give up half a day’s work to watch a play by Sophocles in the ampi-theatre but that was real art. Yeah, ok. You can keep your phone on you. But just you pay attention, some day you’ll be out on the boat yourself.

Ok, now what was I saying? Yeah, this river here. It divides the living from the dead. Now, when I first started in the business, I used to get a different kind of customer. Problem with that sort of customer was they were already bloody dead! You got your coin but that was it! See the problem with that? Well…do you? You get a customer once! Once! They never come back.

Now, sometimes you’d get the odd customer who wasn’t dead. Hero wannabes…don’t get me started on that poser Sisyphus. Yeah, them lot,  they’d be on some sort of crusade, usually to impress a lass, or rescue a lass who’d gotten lost in the underworld. There was this one lass, Persephone…she was a real looker. Anyway, I sat there thinking and I says to myself, Charon mate. Think long term.

The dead only pay once, and A league gods come and go. Do we even have those types of gods these days?

…What?

Really?

What in Hades is a ‘social media influencer;?

In my day a god didn’t need a social media presence.

Anyways, I says to myself, diversify. There’s nothing in the oracles that says I can’t change the rules up. It’s a riddle. What’s the difference between the dead, a god on an ego quest and an addict?

Nah, think it through boy!

They’re all seekers, don’t ya see? They’re all desperate to leave this world, even for a short while. You and me, we provide them a service. Don’t let people judge you, boy. People act like this earth is the place to be, but the stories I hear on the boat, I tell you. I’ve heard it all.

If you don’t learn anything else today, son, just remember this.

In this job, we don’t judge. This earth is meant to be paradise, but most people spend their lives doing anything for a bit of a peace and a bit of love. The inferno’s on earth boy, not anywhere else.

That’s why I have a soft spot for the living seekers.

They’re the only ones who see this world for what it really is. And if you see the world for what it really is, it’ll break your bloody heart.

Links to previous parts of this short story

The Ferryman 2

In Ancient Greece, the Ferryman was named ‘Charon’, meaning ‘he of the keen gaze.’ Writers of antiquity represented the Ferryman in multiple ways, ranging from a sordid god, to a surly old man, to a silent, hooded figure.

Lungs like Teflon that one. She’s a lifelong punter.

Nah, you started it mate, so if you can’t hack it, you shouldn’t dish it out. You’re with me for the day. I’ll show you a day in my life. Think of it as bloody celebrity apprentice.  I know I said the methadone clinic is trying to royally shaft me, but you gotta keep thinking, there’s customers there who use on the side. See that one, that guy over there, been on the ‘done for 20 years, but don’t think he doesn’t slam a bit of ‘done in his veins on the side and smoke the odd pipe.

He’ll see me right into retirement, that one.

No, you dickhead! Don’t let ‘em see us. Get behind the car. Not that they see me, mind you. I’m just here.

What? Yeah. ‘Course they drug test ‘em. But nah they don’t kick ‘em out of the program, they’re raking it in! That owner’s making the big bucks. He’s a bloody wanker, that one.

Shhh, watch. See that one going into the clinic? Yeah, the girl. Look at her. Nah, really look at her. What do you see?

Nah. You’re not looking hard enough. That’s the problem with you and the likes of everyone else. I said to her on the boat once, they don’t see you. Not really. They name you as a thing and then they see you as that thing. Don’t ever let ‘em name you and yeah, she took an old man’s advice. Can’t say I’m not proud of the lass. She’s on the lowest dose of bupe, 2mg. Methadone’s kid sister, mate!

But listen yeah, that girl, she keeps herself to herself. Gets her dose, leaves, doesn’t make small talk. She’s been to uni, got a job, she’ll see me into retirement too.

What d’ya mean how?

Nah, listen. See how thin she is? She’s stopped eating.

Nah, she’s not on the ice, but it’s the hunger that stops her from feeling now, not the gear. And listen, I’m no mug, but I’ll take all kinds of currency. Up to a point though. You should see the young lads playing video games 24-7. Tried to pay me in bitcoin or whatever nonsense that is, but I said…listen, you little shits, I been doing this job for centuries, and ain’t ever heard of this bitcoin.

Paper money comes and goes. Ever been in a country where it takes a wheelbarrow of cash just to buy some bread? Inflation mate.

You gotta have financial nouse to be around as long as I have. Nah, I says to ‘em, I’m a fair bloke. I said to ’em, don’t kid a kidder. I only accept organs and bones, your sanity, memory, worth, relationships, motivation, passion…that sort of thing. That’s true currency.

But back to that girl. Yeah, I’ve got her for life.  She’ll cruise from one addiction to another, legal or not. Bloody oath she will. And she’s got enough life in her to keep going on, but she needs a buffer to get through this whole clusterfuck of existence.

That girl, I need more punters like her. Steady enough to pay, but she’s too scared to live, too scared of getting close to anyone. Them ones, they always make the best bloody customers.

The Ferryman 1

People jeopardise their lives for the sake of making the moment livable. Nothing sways them from habit-not illness, not the sacrifice of love and relationship, not the loss of all earthly goods, not the crushing of their dignity, not the fear of dying.

The drive is relentless.

In the realm of Hungry Ghosts by Dr Gabor Mate

The Ferryman 1 (Short Story)

In Greek Mythology, for the price of a silver coin placed on the lips of the deceased, the Ferryman transported the dead along the river to the otherworld.

Yeah, yeah nah my boat’s as good as…

But the outgoings are killing me.  Could be earning more as an Uber driver…

…yeah well get this, a bloke down the road right, he quit his job in real estate and no-

Nah not shitting you he’s earning over 100k a year!

Yeah. True.

It’s hard and yeah, I reckon she’s gonna outlive me this boat…

But the upkeep-

The teeth you get nowadays, all rootless, bone like baking powder, couldn’t fix the hull. You get more leaks in the boat with teeth like that-

And the livers. Don’t talk to me about the livers.

You can’t get much of a life vest these days from a necrotic liver pickled by grog.

And then there’s the methadone clinics driving me bust with all those punters off the gear and onto the ‘done and bupe, and the young kids now don’t even smoke. Back in my day we had kids with lungs coated in tar. Good waterproofing for the sails, lungs like that.

What? True, true. There’s the poor bastards on the ice but what’ve they got as collateral? I’m taking their fried brains and splintered spirits. How do I sell something like that on? I’m losing money, I tell ya…

You know what it’s like mate. I’m like a cabby in a Covid lockdown, not that I’m complaining the work’s easy and yeah-

A job’s a job.

The whole world’s just about broke, but what’s a man like me gonna do. It’s killing me. The boat’s near falling apart, and it just don’t pay-

What?

Nah. Listen-

Don’t even go there, mate.

Listen.

Listen the way I see it, the world’s fucked, you gonna have your fat cats and then you’re gonna have your sheep, all dead inside chasing their next fucking mortgage, fucking shit hot car and then there’s my customers-

The ones who see how it really is. Them ones, the ones who see this whole mess of a world we’ve all made. And nah, just listen.

They need me. And they need me to take ‘em away for awhile…for a bit of relief, a bit of love…

Nah it’s a bloody community service mate, fuckin’ oath.  I’m tellin ya. No one has a go at the poor bloke at the bottle-o selling goon bags to the deros, you don’t see anyone havin a go at the bird selling eckies at a rave yeah but yeah right, blame yours truly…

I’m not copping it. Not from you.

I just ferry ‘em along the river, give ’em a taste, take them back until they can’t pay me no more and yeah everyone’s gotta be paid. Can’t get something for nothin’. I just take ’em there, give them some relief.

Don’t have a go at me you prick. I just take ‘em for the ride.