Back from visiting Peter A up at Margate. How hard not to focus solely on the two star-like slashes on his wrists when I try to write of how the visit went.
Slashed wrists are an exclamation point. They command the attention. You can sum up a visit, albeit incorrectly, saying "He slashed his wrists fifteen years ago".
As though that sums up Peter entirely. As ever, the truth is far more complicated and harder to define.
What to say? He doesn't have a good word for anyone, it seems at times, and yet he is so tortured by injustices to people. But people he does not know - Kar'en refugees, the Koori boy in grade two. How can he hate everyone specifically and preach a love for everyone generally?
To be fair, he did not completely slander a couple of people. His dying friend with cancer, Kia. Robbie;s brother. A good bloke. And productive. Restoring some Italian motorbikes even with the cancer treatment. Whilst Peter sleeps in his bunker, as he puts it. The beach is Peter's home, he reckons. Every morning Peter walks to the chemist at Redcliffe, picks up his first of two daily metro doses, then walks to the boardwalk at Margate and climbs under it. Sits there drinking, as the world passes over, oblivious to his existence.
As the day comes to an end he walks back to the same chemist and picks up the second dose. He tried picking up the entire 165mg in one dose each day, but found he was waking at 5am, sick. Hard to think how one could be sick on 165mg, most people would be dead several times over, most junkies with expensive habits would be on the nod, severely. But not Peter. And not because he is Peter, but because he is human.
He adjusts. Adapts. His body learns how to process 165mg of metro efficiently. A lethal dose is just another metabolic task when introduced slowly, or on top of a habit.
In Thailand fifteen years back, the time he opened his wrists to the air, he got off metro. Opium suppositories. Three months but worth it. There is no coming off a dose of 165mg metro in Australia, well, no legal method.
Funny to think you find yourself in life at times with no legal ability to exist. That's how it feels. You cannot conceive of life without gear, as the level of sickness that entails is too much to comprehend. And so long. Not days like in the movies but months and months of horror.
You could supply yourself with a few grams of smack every day, however you do that. Dealing, feeling or stealing. That would mask most metro symptoms, but of course you would have a monster gear habit at the end of it, and need metro to wean you off that. Catch 22.
The opium isn't as harsh to come off, although of course it's no picnic. I should mention that Peter reminded me of the Gollum, of Lord of the Rings, a la P Jackson style. Big piercing eyes, made bigger by the face's emaciation. A collapsing jawline always hollows out the face, and teeth don't stand up well to opiated lifestyles, be it the sugar dependency or the saliva deprivation, or just the metro itself. Biodone minimises tooth decay but it's too late for Peter. I get the impression of some sort of super tooth in the front row, an amalgam of a couple of teeth, surrounded by cavities and yellow and black stains.
His nails are long, tobacco dyed. Hair unkempt, down to his chest. Fu manchu moustache and beard, grey and scraggly.
He tells me he has not showered for several years. When it's warm the ocean does this for him.
And the animal part of your brain is looking for differences between you and him. What has he done that you have not done, that will excuse you from his ending? Well, he hit gear very hard, no thought of tomorrow. He took metro on top of booze, on top of pills, with oblivion the only goal and entire goal.
I like to think I was neither as dedicated or as focussed on oblivion as he. That's my exemption status, so to speak.
When I am back at my parents later them of this visit (and of course, focussing on the star-scars of his forearms) dad uses this as a chance to warn me not to end up like him. What else can a father say upon hearing this story? He asked why I was visiting Peter. My lame 'oh he rang me' - after fifteen years, out of the blue, fooled noone...drugs are not to be mentioned. Although all I had done was ring P to source some extra metro, to keep my job whilst I organised some legit metro from my doc.Of course it all fell through and the doc saved me, but I ended up indebted to visiting Peter, so there I was on the Queen's Birthday, watching him weep as he discussed the effects of a mortar on a hill tribe refugee camp. How the Thai police took bribes to let the guys with mortars from SLORC come through the border and target practice with the kids and women.
My only conclusion was that humanity had done to Peter what he tried to undo with metro and booze. And where does that leave me? Sitting on a stool with him asking me how you kill the system.
" I wish I could be one of those hill tribe boys with an AK in the jungle over there. At least they get to kill someone." he says
He cannot see his enemy in this life. Words like nebulous, vague, ether come to mind. You know there is a wrong to be righted but you cannot put your hands on it, and that drives you mad. I don't want to write about it until I can write like Kurt Vonnegut - i.e. drop my earnestness and adopt a detached casualness. But I fear for making it that far, so write early and undeveloped.