Sydney Noir

by John Dale

  “Cathy didn’t understand my vision. Cathy was disloyal.”

  “What?” says Mugzy. “What happened to Cathy?”

  “Look out the window,” I say. “Behind the laundry. There’s your beloved, under the dirt.”

  He turns and looks where I’m pointing.

  “You want to know what happened to Cathy? I’ll show you what happened to Cathy.”

  He’s still looking out when I pick up the iron and swing it at the back of his head. I think about Nara, about Cathy deserting me, about that Post-it and how I didn’t grab the kitchen knife, I got the iron and flung it at her, then I picked up my scissors and stabbed her to make sure. No more pink Post-its, just like that. I think about how I took her phone and texted her friends to say she was going overseas for a funeral. I texted her salsafucking man, telling him it was time to break up. It’s not you, I typed, it’s me.

  “What?” says Mugzy. He’s standing still, staring at himself in the mirror. The back of his head has caved in, but he can’t see it.

  He drops forward.

  I light a cigarette and smoke it. I stroll around the studio. I look at him sprawled on the carpet. I wash the iron in the kitchen sink. I watch red run off steel. I think, Well, it was the best I could do under the time pressure. The styling leaves a bit to be desired, but I can still win this whole competition.

  Ava Rodriguez says from the couch, “He would look better in the coffin, Rioko, not on the carpet. Remember, it needs to be a complete look.”

  “You’re so right,” I say.

  I grab Mugzy by the ankles and drag him to the coffin. He’s heavy but I lift him in part by part.

  “Hngh,” he says, all hoarse. “Hnnngh.”

  I light another cigarette. I hold the orange tip to the collar of the cape. The straw starts to burn. Mugzy panics and squirms. I put my face close to his face, close like the way I look at my pores in the mirror, and I say, “So now you know. Cathy’s got no forwarding address.”

  He whimpers. “Who the fuck ever cared about Cathy? The pickup book was wrong.”

  Everything smells like blood and incense. I think to myself, His face shouldn’t look like this, what is all this red leaking onto the white? What was the makeup team thinking? And while I’m pondering the question, Mugzy grabs the ends of my tape measure and twists them tight around my throat. I fight for air. I collapse on him, chest to chest. The little flames lick his shroud, and his hair and my hair, and his face and my face, and then someone taps me on the shoulder and I hear Ava Rodriguez saying, “Congratulations, Rioko, your show was a triumph. You are the winner of Real Couturier.”

  As I relax into black, I hear Mugzy too.

  “First time I touched you, little rat,” he says, “I knew you were the one.”

  TOXIC NOSTALGIA

  by Peter Polites

  Bankstown

  1.

  The city can give you AIDS but the suburbs can make you crazy. I wish I knew this back in the day, when two pin-sized peepers were looking through me, like my twentysomething-year-old body was translucent.

  * * *

  Hendo was sitting cross-legged on the bed. His room was filled with skid-marked sheets, piles of clothes, Sharpies, and used condoms. “Come somewhere,” I said. He found a baggie in the sheets and turned it inside out. His tongue rolled into the plastic, lapped up the shards. I jumped up and down on the mattress. “Come with me!” I said. Coins we lost in the blankets rained down on the floor. “It’ll be fun! Fun! Fun!” Two hands on his shoulders, facing him directly. “I used to go there as a kid,” I said, shaking him back and forth.

  Before this time at Hendo’s I lived with my dad. I came home late once. Next morning he woke me up by screaming at me for leaving the lights on. So I told him I was a faggot. He kicked me out. I packed up a gym bag of clothes, left the house, and slept on couches of people I knew. Ended up crashing mostly with Hendo. We always ran out of things to do.

  * * *

  Hendo sat in the passenger’s side of my car smoking joints. I drove us in and out of the tunnels and yelled out, “Shotty, shotty, shotty!” He inverted the roach. His head went directly in front of mine. Blew smoke in my mouth.

  Back in the day you could get from the inner city to western Sydney in thirty minutes.

  I drove down Georges River Road, pulled into a rest stop. Hatchbacks lined up against utes. Next to the parking lot was some scrub. Just beyond it was the shit-colored brown of the Georges River.

  Back in the day “a beat” was a three-dimensional version of an online gay sex app. Suss suburban kweens on the down-low congregated around parks.

  Hendo and I got out of the car, walked past some trucks. We stepped on condoms. Fingernail-sized pebbles crunched under our soles. We swatted at our ears every time we heard the buzz of mosquitoes. At the edge of the car park, we looked down at the river and saw the outline of two guys sitting on some rocks. We took a path into the bushes. Burrs got stuck to the hairs on my legs.

  “Used to know this retail queen that did blue-collar drag,” I said to Hendo as we walked among the trees. “Nights he would put on steel-cap boots and work shorts and come down here.” When the sounds of cars passing took a break, faint noises of grunts and slurps floated through the brambles.

  Men slowed down to pass us. They did the up-down eye scan. Some of them wore too-clean steel-cap boots. Hendo tried to read them. He’d just see a Leb with the angry sands of the desert running through his eyes. I would pay attention to the Lebanese boy with his femme-esque tapered eyebrows. To Hendo an islander in a Dickies T was maybe a shifty cunt, but I’d see a coconut kid who wore big bro’s hand-me-downs, soppy brown eyes looking for the love of an absent daddy.

  My fingers traced the squiggle indents on the bark of a crooked gum. Hendo walked ahead. Some overly worked pecs with chicken legs caught Hendo’s eyes; he tailgated the guy to the bank of the river. Left me alone. I walked out of the scrub onto the embankment next to the road. I found an old log and sat on it and emptied my mind onto the oncoming cars.

  A few cigarettes later Hendo called out to me. I turned around, watched him approach through clumps of grass.

  “I have some terrible news,” he said.

  “What? D’ya get more of the HIV again?” I asked.

  “No, worse. He was a sub-bottom that presented masc clone.”

  Hendo’s Nokia went beep. He covered his face with his hands. The Nokia went beep again. He showed me the message: 8===) now.

  The gay vampire behind the text message was Manco. A Bram Stoker dream with fangs that dripped pure amphetemine base. Failed actor. Never in that wannabe Hollywood way. Television too vulgar for a straw hat–wearing private school boy. At a time when he should have been getting passed over to play the dad in sitcoms he became “that dealer dude.”

  Manco bandwagoned the drug scene just before the early noughties, just before the outlaw motorcycle gangs took over the club drug trade. It was the bikies and their chrome-mounted skirmishes that made it hard to access a good-quality MDMA. Pills were getting cut with a smacky-type chemical. Instead of inspirational energy you’d get rolling eyes, a desire to park it, cross your legs on the floor while your neck became jelly. Little pills of Mercedes and doves and the blue LVs gone. Poorer customers like Hendo just injected speed. Coke, although off-the-planet expensive in Sydney, was not affected price-wise, proving once again that nothing affects the rich.

  Manco kept good clients. Corporate gay drones and the aggressive young blond ladies in public relations. But the truth about dealers is melancholic. Its illegality creates informal friendships. The kind of upwardly mobile queens who can afford designer chems don’t have time for some dropkick peddler.

  Manco dealt with the yearns by keeping boys. Boys like Hendo. Money poor, drug needy. Cap in hand. Sure! But you can pay me back. You got no collateral. Hendo racked up a debt and then got called in on orgies as payback.

  “I don’t know what to do. He is ruining sex and my nightclub expe
rience.” Hendo rubbed his biceps. Leaned his big head onto me. In front of us cars went down the highway and I patted his arm.

  2.

  Today I can’t remember what Hendo looks like. Then I start with the biohazard tattoo on his arm and there he is. Sitting next to me in my passenger seat. Lifting his sleeve to show me it. His head folds up and down every time he speaks. Skin around his eyes have pavement cracks. Massive pores but always too dry. But I can hear Hendo’s voice saying to me, “You are beau-ti-ful.”

  During those times, men told me a shitty story about myself. They looked at my Mediterranean skin and too-black hair and thought I was something I wasn’t. They would sidle up next to me at bars and ask, “Lost your girlfriend?” or introduce themselves with the elegant, “I really like wog boys.” Bolder men would say, “Please rape me.” Masculine projection was a fatigue. So I’ll always remember Hendo leaning his head onto my shoulder, laughing at my jokes, and telling me I was beautiful.

  I turned into Deepwater Reserve just as Hendo passed me the pipe. No streetlights, just a road in a tunnel of trees. High beams lit up a guy walking out of the bush. He was in his fifties, craggy bod, wearing a G-string. Skin like ash. Thin old skeleton with loose flanks of flesh hanging from his sides.

  We parked amongst some other cars and got out. Hendo and I walked toward the bank of the river. Across the clearing, we saw an ember of a cigarette glowing. It looked like an alien light from far away, so we went to check out if the dude was fuckable. A young man was sitting on a picnic table with his feet on the seat. His chest was folded over his knees and a pink singlet fell off his hairy skinny bod. He looked up when he heard us coming. The galaxy-black eyes of Lou Marcello.

  Hendo knew Lou, they’d killed a million brain cells together and they also used to fuck. But Lou fell in love in the way only lost boys can. Nervous desire. Talking about monogamy but constantly cheating. When they were together, Lou was once rolling around on the grass of a public park, his eyes falling into the back of his head. He latched his hands onto Hendo’s calves. “Infect me . . . infect me . . .” Hendo kept walking, while Lou’s hands dragged at his calf. “Fuck off, you boring bug chaser,” said Hendo as he moved away.

  Lou changed after that night. Wore a gold cross around his neck. Decided to shack up with some Turk who had tattoos. They moved in together and played happy families until Lou would show up with an “I walked into a door” bruise. They stayed together. Lou found that familiar suburban purgatory.

  But Lou had that Calabrian skin that shone in the dark. He looked up at us and rubbed his neck.

  “Did you get an SMS too?” he asked Hendo.

  “Manco makes us do things. Weird dodgy shit.”

  “Not gonna say shit to my boyfriend. I’m scared as . . .” said Lou. The sound of water was lapping at the bank. The river was munching on soil and it was the soundtrack to how we were feeling.

  Heard twigs crack. Our eardrums sparked. Sound of footsteps coming toward us. We all turned to face the direction of the noise. Looked to the clearing, expecting something to come through the bushes. Footsteps getting louder. Hendo’s body became hard. I put one foot behind the other and raised my fists. The footsteps came closer still. More than one set of feet came at us, started running toward us. Hendo picked up a branch and held it up. Lou put a massive rock in his hand and stood behind me.

  The craggy old man in a G-string and sneakers appeared out of the scrub. He saw us and started running. Just behind him was a twink, his face all scratched from twigs. “Cops,” said the twink, and ran off.

  “Chill,” said Hendo. “They are powerless, just a buzzkill.”

  We sat back down around the picnic table. Two officers strolled toward us. One a solid ranga, the other too much short-man syndrome.

  “Gentlemen, how is your evening going?” said Constable Ranga. “We have had some complaints about antisocial behavior.”

  “Au contraire. We are being extremely sociable,” replied Hendo. His voice was pearls hanging against cashmere. The officer had to step back and catch himself from the blow.

  “We have taken your number plates down and we will be paying visits to your homes,” said Constable Ranga.

  “Then by all means, violate as many legal statutes as you can,” Hendo countered.

  The pair of cops puffed up their chests. Hendo stood up in front of us, putting himself in between us and the cops. He addressed the cops as their badge numbers. He pulled out a Nokia and made a call, covered his mouth as he whispered into the phone, and then handed it to Constable Ranga. The cop listened and nodded. Handed the phone back to Hendo. The cop looked over at his fellow officer, did a let’s-go gesture with his eyes. The other cop was puzzled but followed orders. They walked off. Lou, Hendo, and I folded our arms as they disappeared.

  “What the hell was that, Hendo?” I asked. I rubbed the back of his neck and he told me to forget about it.

  3.

  Lou invited us back to his duplex. The tattooed Turk he lived with was doing a night shift. Hendo walked into the house and looked around like it was a museum. He examined the secondhand IKEA sofa like it had a plaque on it. His hand lifted a Murano ashtray on the coffee table and held it up to the light, looking at the colored glint of the glass. He picked up the remote. The TV with endless channels kept him occupied. An average suburban house was a curiosity for Hendo. Meanwhile, any alone time with Lou and we’d reminisce. That no-good goo honeyed our mind hives.

  I’d met Lou at a house party down the road from Bankstown Maccas. We were both teenlings. He was there with some fire-twirling twink and I was there with some straight boys. Me and my boys entered the house from the driveway. In the backyard people just stared at us. Some of my boys tried to talk shit with the girls and we got pushed out of the party. We were all stoned, all in Adidas. I sat on a car out front of the house and Lou passed me a flask. Same deal. Both wogs. He Italian, me Greek. Both out of place. His dad was Lucky Marcello, in jail for a hit on a business deal that went kerplunk. Mama and Nonna and a herd of older sisters kept him out of trouble.

  For us there was a window for sex. The window closed and love cemented. I was happy for him. He got out. Found a man who kept him. His job was to clean and keep it tight. Barrels of protein powder accessorized his kitchen.

  Lou wanted to complete the 2.5 gay dream with a puppy. Said something about a French bulldog. I told him about a childhood pet goat that I’d had. She was the color of the dirty sea foam, so we called her Afroditi.

  Afroditi climbed trees. She’d get up there and sometimes couldn’t get down. Afroditi would find herself up in trees. She would holler in distress. Sounded like a toddler being murdered. Then me or Dad would have to find a way to get her. Sometimes I would get a ladder and wrestle her down. Sometimes I’d put her over my shoulders and hear her cry. One time my dad got fed up; he was sick of getting her down. We were standing in front of the olive tree and she was high in the branches. Dad ran into the house and came out holding his double-barreled shotgun. As he marched he put shells in the barrel. Cocked the gun. A failsafe way of getting her out of the tree. I ran and pushed the shotgun down just as he was about to shoot. The shot fired. My eardrums burst and the grass exploded below us.

  4.

  Back in the day, peak Sydney was interchangeable with being gay. The highways from the suburbs into the city were like our own yellow-brick roads. Some nightclubs were tiny holes in the walls. The international superclub fad had kicked off, places that were three stories high, dedicated gay venues that played handbag house upstairs and underground electro downstairs. The City of Oz, with its emerald jealous streets and amyl nitrate scent, was—once—a playground for Dorothy’s friends.

  Hendo, Lou, and I became a trinity. Summer Sunday-night dancing became ours. We hit the strip. One of the clubs was a chemical dungeon. Descend downstairs and everyone who was too ugly to fit into mainstream land, too drug-fucked to hold down a job, too loose to care, too chemically washed out, would come togethe
r. The four-four drum led a coven of people. Pozbears praising Dionysius in a sweat frenzy.

  The most common phrase I heard was, Just go home, you’re trashed. Hendo or Lou would defend me. On long weekends, we would laugh at all the suits feigning bohemia before they went back to their office cubicles.

  Sunday club bond was our breaking bread and Lou partitioned himself—his new suburban house husband life vs. his old chems club kid past. On Sunday nights, he’d pop by at six p.m. Straight-to-our-heads champagne and we’d drink it out of plastic flutes and jars. Allowing the ingredients of alcohol to prolong casual touches. Once Hendo placed a hand on Lou’s leg and Lou got up and mumbled something about his tatted Turk husband waiting for him at home.

  They left me at times. Manco would call them in. He wanted a night. I wanted a room to myself and they’d go hesitantly. From the window, I would watch them go down the street. Two men who were boys walked off with heads bowed, making for the world they wanted to leave behind. They passed people in the street: happy couples, corporate gays, women with prams.

  That night, I picked out Sharpies from Hendo’s sheet ball and curled up. Round midnight the bedsheet filth made me itch. I woke and Hendo and Lou hadn’t returned.

  5.

  Hendo slept the big chemical coma. Someone once said that dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

  Lou told me how it went down.

  They’d both arrived at Manco’s building. Buzzer pressed, indecipherable static answer. Cheap foyer, up a mirrored elevator. Hendo and Lou were testifying to each other. “Something gotta change, something has to become new, I can’t do this.” They arrived at the apartment and inside were three fit-looking finance-sector bodies in their work uniforms. Manco handed them knee pads. Lou started to put them on. Hendo said the color didn’t suit him.