I walked the streets in a roseate glow and a polka-dotted sheepskin fur. It was 1995, I was in Melbourne, money had never come easier nor faster, I had a beautiful woman by my side and I didn't feel the ground beneath my feet. Everyone says we never know our halcyon days at the time, but I like to think I had an inkling. I mused that Nick Cave would be put to writers cramp if he had but spent a day with me and my true love, so much fuel for love songs would we have generated.
Now, looking back, I think he may have done so but secretly, off the page, he would have filled his song-writer's mind with the real treasure, the Coming Fall, the pain unanticipated and made greater in its delivery, due that.
I would garner a few days profit, usually a quarter ounce bag, and fly on down to Melbourne. Sometimes every Friday, sometimes fortnightly. A friend would fill in for me over the weekend and I'd be down south. Stash the masking tape wrapped golf ball down my pants then behind a dumpster outside her flat when I arrived.
The year had started grim. My mentor, I guess, a Kiwi a decade older than me, had died in a boarding house in Melbourne, broken hearted and alone. He had started dating a flatmate of mine from the first house i moved into after my parents.
Things had been messy even then. I remember an overdose of a girl I had slept with once or twice in that same house, the girl with the front room. Trying to keep her alive and not let the other flatmate, my friend's gal, wake up fell apart when she started doing that horrid death rattle.
The flatmate eventually ended it over his using. He had been four days in a hot cheap room before they found his body. Someone had stolen his radio from beside his body. Details i remember. A funeral at Kevin Grove Cannon and Cripps. That same morning I had started my relationship with the Melbourne girl. Starts and finishes. Doom waits. In one day I'd fallen in love, buried a friend, and saved from arrest just as cops started a personal search on me as my taxi turned up at Mt Coot-tha base.
--- A neighbour bangs on my wall, my door, i struggle a hot shirt on and open it to noone. I have washed up for the first time in weeks. Grease pit sink and cockroaches in the pantry, a junkie cliche just missing empty table tops from the hocked tellie. In the car on the weekend my ma spied an iPod Touch box.
"Do you have an iPod" she asked, hopefully. I guess me having an iPod would be a Sign of non-use. I didn't want to give false hope, I didn't want to lie.
"I showed it to you last year remember, with the touch screen pictures and stuff?"
About two months before i hocked it for $80 to get on. And never picked it up. $400 purchase price a few months before. Junkies aren't made to have assets and I tried to break the rules.