Avid Reader, Boundary Street, West End.
Rocking Horse Records, 245 Albert St, Brisbane City
Sonic Sherpa, 12/360 Logan Road, Stones Corner
Mary Ryan, 85 Merthyr Road, New Farm
State Library Bookshop, South Brisbane
Gleebooks, Glebe, Sydney
We met with you on a Saturday at a hotel on the Surfer’s Paradise Strip, to have a lunch where you and Matthew Condon once trolled the Gold Coast on many boozy occasions. Me, my broken heart and this owl-faced human, arrived and waited in the lobby while primary schoolers in suits arrived in Porsche SUVs. Frank ambled out, a little late, a little flustered and blowing in his blue collared shirt and braces. The Owl blinked at him unsure and stammered out a shaky ‘hello’. Her fear of death still raging in her ears from a short trip on my motorcycle, and now ‘The’ Frank Moorhouse was sitting at her table. She was a second-year publishing assistant, and most of her encounters with literary icons had been at great remove. I’m also pretty sure I’d just told her we were meeting an old friend for dinner (of course, she hated surprises– how was I to know?). After brief introductions, the David Attenborough of Australian intellectual wit recommended three Jack Daniels and Cokes, which we ordered, and then opened a briefcase and pulled out an immense stack of papers.
“My sincere apologies, Adam, Owl, I have some business to attend to. I hope you don’t mind me imposing, but I need your help with something first.”
“Of course, no problem, Frank,” I smiled.
“I need you to witness and sign my will. If that’s okay.”
…stunned looks.
“Suuure…”
I took a sip, and he handed me the pen, then looked around for more drinks.
“Just every marked page, if you don’t mind, Both of you.”
So, there I sat with my future long-term partner and her crushing fear of death on our third date staring at each other like something out of David Lynch until he returned and we drank. And from there, we sat in The Legends and ate prawns, and Frank and I talked in the way you always wish you’d be able to talk to your idols, but never get to.
“Maybe you should join La Compagnie de l’art? Hope things go very well this year. I think the world is in dire shape. I think you need to research Art Brut.”
Snacking on pickled jellyfish and clams on fat noodles, buttery Hong Kong crab slivers in soup, broiled sea bream and Szechuan beans, and a tiny bowl of rice, snapping up all that good food on Frank’s cards like hungry junior academics.
“Have we ordered too much? Or not enough?” Frank pondered, staring down the barrel of the vortex of Cantonese seafood.
“Oh, Frank, this is too much already. We couldn’t…” said Owl, urging restraint.
“Nonsense, my dear, we most certainly can. The oysters are plump, and the tide is high! Compliments of Random House Publishing.”
“I remember when we tried to divine your spirit animal, Frank. I think someone decided you were a koala, and you said, ‘No! I am an oyster! Are oysters cannibals?’”
“Like attracts like, as much as it’s opposites.”
“Anyway, they’re getting super-sized jellyfish in the Bohai Sea,” I added.
“Really?” Frank’s interest piqued.
“They’re massive–think hatchbacks. They’re so big they break the trawlers’ fishing nets. It’s all from the Chinese dumping millions of tonnes of hormonal animal feed and mass livestock waste in the rivers. One day, they could take over!”
“We should be eating more of them!”
Shellfish devoured and expenses expended, the Oyster, the Owl, and the I rejoined the gangway of the Gold Coast highway, without a fish between us, bellies rolling, rods of speech dipping in the streetlights, the Owl hovering, swooping in from time to time.
“A shame they were out of the spit-roasted whale,” Owl quipped.
“I’m more of a whiting man myself,” I offered.
“The martini of fish!” cried the Oyster.
*
After an hour or two, he was off on official Oyster business as we were, on Bear business. On our way back to Brisbane, we stopped in at a high-rise with low rent, delivering desserts to a mad friend who lived in a tower overlooking a preposterous new Ferris wheel. Hardened money collectors parted like the waves before Moses when we arrived with McDonalds. Never one to miss an opportunity to show rather than tell everyone who was the boss, the dealer, a tiny maniac I once called the Dormouse, would make the line of tattooed and steroidal hard-men get up and shuffle down the couch as we delivered Oreo McFlurries, thick shakes, and fries. Then, he would pass the crack pipe after weed pipe, as was his custom, and I would take both while waiting for my little bag of weed. The Owl perched wide-eyed and ready for flight, until his 17-year-old Cambodian girlfriend appeared, and, paying no attention to the violence in the air, grabbed her by the hand, and without a moment’s notice, began doing the owl’s nails. The Dormouse, pushing his crystals on me while she was occupied; careful not to be swayed, I reminded him that I would never have enough money for that kind of game. He thought it over.
“You want a party pack?”
“A what?”
“How much money you got?”
“45 bucks”
“Make it 50, and I’ll do you a party pack.”
The Dormouse fidgeted as he smiled from behind a circle of smoke.
A party pack, it turned out, was a vial full of pills: blue ones, green ones, yellow, Benzedrine, codeine, ephedrine–maybe a couple hundred dollars’ worth–just to show the other boys that the dealer giveth and the dealer taketh away.
He explained them in order,
“Them to go up, then 30 minutes, them to go fast, them to go slow. Then 45 or an hour, them to go spacy, them to go slow–and those last ones, they’re strong, they sleep.”
I thought about it as him and the muscle talked shop, and the mumbling turned to jabbering as they forgave my intrusion. I wondered whether this would bring doom–or glory–taking this in front of the others. Looked over to the Owl, who shrugged, and feigning toughness, muttered,
“Fuck it, Adam, I’m driving.”
I thought, fuck it, the Owl is driving. I took the first two. The Dormouse suddenly stopped his train of speech.
“Wait–which ones did you take?”
“The two blue ones, the ones you said,” I replied, doubt creeping in.
“The ones at the top or the ones at the bottom?” he asked, concern creeping across his face.
“These ones. The ones at the top. The ones YOU said.”
“Oh… you took them already? In front of all of us?”
“I thought you wanted to ride the night train…”
A twinkle in his eye, the sick joke landing, no, I am unkillable, I have signed a book of death today.
“FUCK YOU! CUUUUUNT!” I groaned.
The dealer cackling, the steroidal action figure humans stunned– or too tough to laugh.
And the girl and I retired, and sleeping with her was like offering a little death, over and over, and the drugs rolled me through a night and a day of extraordinary sex in the golden afternoon, to several moments of near death on the couch when I thought my heart would slow so much it would actually stop, then racing, unbreakable erections and hot nipples in sheets, and the world was a blur for me spun out on sheets in a chemical maelstrom with a quivering lover. Her heart-shaped face, her beak and tiny mouth trembling, eyes wide, and, for the first time, I saw a woman trembling under me in waves of orgasms, her boyish body convulsing again and again, like some kind of freak-dream. I asked if this happened every time she fucked, and she swore it was just me. Though I wanted to believe her, I would later come to understand she was really fucking her fears, riding secret terror-driven updrafts that came with the force of something much darker and less sweet. We wiped down, and she drank vodka neat, bit the glass with the tips of her teeth, and everything was astonishing to me that night and the next day, as I went up and down and east and west on chemical swells, and as the last two pills hit, I really did, for several minutes, believe my heart was about to stop. Until the tide shifted and, finally, we slept sound on a Sunday.
*
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAgghghghg
Errrggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh
Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhiiiiiii
Eerrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg
Ggggggggggggggggghrhrhrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Who the fuck was that? I woke in the afternoon, spread-eagled with thoroughly whipped balls and scrote splayed to the apricot sunshine pouring through the corrugated eaves of the immaculate old Bowen Hills Queenslander, showered in a pile of used condoms and cum tissue sand castles, head splitting and no Owl and –
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEUUUUURRRRGGGGHHHHHH
It was getting worse, and it wasn’t next door, as I hoped. I knew the Owl had gone to work, but a girl’s scream split through my cranium from the direction of the Owl’s housemate’s room.
I stumbled out of bed and whipped on jeans, still reeking of vodka, spilled into the living room, and made my wayto the repeated screams. The housemate was in the hallway on the right, pointing. On the left, the other housemate was in a pile of rubbish bags on the polished hardwood floors, with oven bags and cans of vegan beans and bread packets, sprawled out on the floor.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERGHHHHHHHHHH
Slipping in something, I rushed to him, the floor a lake of blood lying thick under. Something more real than real, and I told him to calm down as I reached for his arm with my left. Then my hand slipped off, and I saw both veins were cut the wrong way, straight slices across, like cuff links, but bulging red with meat cut down to the tendons, cut to the bones, both sides a glint of white halfinch deep cuts, and he tried to sit up and his lean stomach opened from one side to the other like a mouth.
“TOWEL TOWEL TOWEL!” I yelled back at the housemate. “SIT DOWN, MATE. SIT DOWN, PLEASE.” Pleading and then him trying to talk, eyes dark and wild, pale white, gaunt, and a glob of spit hitting beneath my eye, burning like acid. And as I pulled away, he lunged at the kitchen sink and brought the foot-long blade back as though to put it in him and I scrambled forward in the blood slick, sticking thick to fingers and hands grip slipping up his wrists as he tried to force the steel back into himself, to carve a new hole or drive it through his back. My fingers on the bones or ligaments that should have been inside his wrists, and held it there. Knowing that, he would soon lose strength. His torso speaking red sentences. The mouth singing blood songs as it hovered over his belly for hours, and then the knife clattered to the floor, and I kicked it away sliding keenly through the warm morning’s scarlet drawing.
And soon, the cops were there. Team blue in a wet red room, Glocks out and pointing at my back yelling.
“I’M UNARMED! I’m unarmed!”
“HANDS UP! HANDS UP! HANDS UP!”
“I am complying, I am not resisting, he was trying to kill himself, there’s a knife over there…”
“WHERE? FUCKIN’ WHERE?”
“Right near your feet, I got it off him. He was tryin’ to put it back in himself.”
In a moment, they holstered the guns and told me to get out.
In front with the ambulance, the senior sargeant told me I probably saved the guy. He told me he’d drank an entire litre of high concentrate Drano, and that it had burned all the way down his throat and probably through his stomach and intestines. “That explained the acid spit,” I said. Then he asked me if I had anything I shouldn’t have in the house. And I said, “Maybe.” And he told me to get rid of it. So, I went back into the crime scene and threw some evidence in the backyard. And later smoked it in one breath, the moment the cops left. And I called dad from the Owl’s family’s house. And for the first time in a long time, we prayed together.
*
Months later, we go visit the housemate. He is finally out of the ICU and in the medium ward after months of dialysis and multiple lifesaving treatments, as the hole in his intestines mended. Still with a pipe going through his neck and down his stomach, and another pipe judiciously used by the nurses to clear his mouth of saliva.
When I came closer, I asked him why and he told us about the voices he’d mentioned once before. How they were angelic, but then became hellish if he talked about them. I asked him what that meant. Then he wrote it out.
I can’t, they get angry.
Machines bleeping. Nurse sucking spittle.
I want to thank
you and your dad.
“Why? You’ve never met my dad.”
You sent a flower,
To my mind.
A gift in the darkness,
It opened.
And you know what? I’m not sure I believe him, Frank. To be frank. Remember when you told me you were done with manifestos, and knew nothing about poetry? Well,
I’m sending you a flower from my mind.