Sunshine & Shadow

by Larry Writer

  I employed Stephen as an office assistant at McGrath’s. A couple of years ago when McGrath’s handed out their annual awards for excellence within the organisation, Steve’s hard work and friendly nature saw him named Most Valuable Employee. He has worked for me now for nine years.

  Sixteen years ago, a polite and intelligent young man from Grafton named Ben Collier knocked on my door, and asked for a job as a sales assistant. I liked him and recognised his potential. His dream was to sell real estate. He had a regular job manning the door at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Double Bay but he said he was prepared to work for nothing to learn the real estate ropes with me. Instead of money, I paid Ben with a big bowl of spaghetti at a local restaurant after a Saturday’s work. After a week I knew this kid was going to be very good at selling property and it was embarrassing not to be paying him any money, so I worked out an arrangement whereby he worked Saturdays and Sundays and received a small wage. He made himself indispensible. Soon he was working weekends at inspections and then a couple of days a week in the office doing telemarketing, all the while completing a Property Advanced Course at technical college. In fairly quick time he became one of McGrath’s best sales people. I’d never known anyone so eager to learn and succeed. He was always moving at a thousand miles an hour.

  Sometimes he rushed into things too quickly. Typical of Ben was when at one of his first inspections I told him to put a flag at the front of the house for sale announcing when the openings were to be held. He did but put the flag upright instead of sideways so it drooped and you couldn’t read what was on it. And he’d buzz around properties frantically. Once he whacked his head on a door jamb and split it open and people were arriving at the house and he greeted prospective buyers in a daze and with blood streaming down his face.

  The key to Ben was convincing him to slow down and realise that he’d be more effective if he was more methodical. I said to him, ‘Ben, have you heard the story of the big bull and the little bull?’ He hadn’t, so I told him. ‘A big bull and a little bull are sitting on a hill looking down at the cows in the paddock and the little bull says to the big bull, “Why don’t we run down there and have sex with one of the cows?” and the big bull replies, “Why don’t we walk down there and have sex with all of them.”’

  Ben is not a difficult name to remember. So how come everyone got it wrong? He’d introduce himself, ‘I’m Ben B-E-N Collier,’ which didn’t stop clients, for some reason, calling him Glenn, Neil, Bob, John … everything but Ben.

  People know his name today. His valued clients include Toni Collette, Collette Dinnigan, Hugh Jackman and Deborra-Lee Furness. He is one of the best agents not only in our company, but in the land. Ben and I have a rewarding friendship and our families often share enjoyable experiences.

  A girl named Pip Johnston worked with me for six years. She joined the company straight from high school. Pip was brilliant and dynamic and played a large role in my success in real estate. In 2003, I was invited by the Real Estate Institute to put in a submission to be named Residential Real Estate Person of the Year. I did as they asked, and I missed out on the award. The next year the Institute invited me again and I declined. Without me knowing, Pip put together a submission for me, and sent it in. This time I won. Sometimes you need excellent people around you to get you across the line.

  It was through my work that I met my wife, Mary. She arrived at an inspection of one of my listings in the mid 1990s and didn’t stay long, but I always remembered her. In 1998, I saw this extremely attractive, dark-haired Canadian woman again, and once more she was looking for a place to live. She turned up with her family, including her mother, Sharon, and her father, Jack. I introduced myself to her. Although I was definitely attracted to her, I was the total professional at the opening. A couple of days later I called Mary and invited her to join me for a coffee. We talked and got on well. I asked her to a movie and we had fun. Everything then moved very quickly and our relationship blossomed. I loved being with her. She was – she is – beautiful and very intelligent.

  I asked Mary to marry me in 1999, and she said, ‘Yes.’ I was walking on air.

  Mary’s family made up for my lack of one. When we went around to her house the place was like a beehive. They were so happy for their daughter, and they told me how much they liked and respected me, and were so sure Mary was in the best of hands. Joyous calls were placed overseas, including to her beloved grandmother in Canada.

  Yet, even though this was one of the most blissful times of my life, I couldn’t enjoy the moment. The insecurities that I had tried so hard to banish, reappeared. Not for the first time, at a moment of triumph, I heard voices in my head telling me that I didn’t deserve success or happiness. That I was a poor kid from Woolloomooloo with a dysfunctional family, and Mary’s family was kind, loving and successful. If there was ever a blueprint for success you would look no further than Jack Cowin, my soon-to-be father-in-law. Self-made, successful, four great kids, but above all a thoroughly decent human being. I was truly happy, yet also feeling a little lonely and sad. Then I managed to turn those negative thoughts around, ‘James, why don’t you just get off your own back and start living life.’

  I’ve always had the ability to stop cold and analyse myself and I don’t always like what I discover, but I do really think about what I’m feeling and then try to work out why I’m feeling like that. This was such a time. I wondered if there was a part of me that would always feel disenfranchised, no matter how much in love with Mary I was, no matter how good I was at selling houses. No matter how far I had travelled from that little house in Woolloomooloo.

  Mary and I were married on 18 March 2000.

  My father died in 1997. Just before, he rang me. I hadn’t spoken to him since my mother died, fifteen years before.

  He was drunk. ‘Hello, is that you James?’ I recognised his voice and my blood turned cold.

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  He must have been befuddled by the booze because he said, ‘James, this is your son ...’

  I said, ‘I haven’t got a son. Who is this?’ I knew exactly who it was but wasn’t giving him an inch.

  ‘Oh, you know who it is.’

  I said, ‘No, I don’t know who it is. I have no idea who it is. Mate, if you don’t identify yourself I’m going to hang up right now …’

  He said, ‘I’m your father.’ ‘No, no, no … You’re wrong there. I haven’t got a father. Identify yourself or I’m hanging up.’

  He just repeated, ‘I’m your father.’

  I said, ‘Let me make this clear one more time. I don’t have a father. Okay? I understand that you, whoever you are, are probably very ill and you are most likely about to die and you are probably ringing me for some sort of forgiveness ... Well, you are not going to get it. You are going to die knowing that you were the cause of my mother’s death. She didn’t die of cancer. She died of you. You killed her, as surely as if you shot her dead. You will take that knowledge with you to your grave.’

  I have always regretted that conversation. It was a moment of great weakness.

  My father died a couple of months later. Steve, who’d been in touch with him at the end, rang me and gave me the news. I said simply, ‘ Thanks for telling me.’

  [STEPHEN]

  my lost years

  In the lead-up to my fight on the Kostya Tszyu card in 1996, it was a terrible struggle to stay away from alcohol. I had been addicted for some years by then, and my obsession to have a drink was so strong but I was determined to give my last fight my best shot. I wanted a drink badly. It was driving me mad. I was on edge all the time, no one could talk to me. I succumbed and had a few. I didn’t have the strength to say no.

  Then when the bell rang at the end of that fight, I no longer had a reason not to drink and I let myself be overwhelmed by alcohol.

  From 1996, I was a hopeless drunk. I lived to get smashed. I continued to sweep the streets in the morning – I loved the early hours as the city came awake and the
homeless men were still my friends – and I organised the defence of clients who came to my firm in Elizabeth Street. But really, I was working to earn the money for my addiction.

  I didn’t get drunk every day. My week would go something like this. No drinking, or at least not too much, on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday; that’s when I’d practise law. On Friday I’d jump out of bed and go sweeping. Then I would go to the pub and reward myself. That first taste of Jack Daniel’s with Coke tasted so bloody good. I felt relaxed, confident, strong, brilliant, irresistible. I wasn’t drinking for the taste, I was drinking to get drunk. I loved that first sensation of fuzzy euphoria that alcohol gave me, and then came the wild optimism, which became anger and aggression, then crazy behaviour, and then sweet oblivion. My binge-drinking would go on, by and large, for four days in a row, Friday to Monday. These days were a blur. All I know is that when Tuesday rolled around again, I’d wake up cut and bruised and sick, with that vague grim knowledge that I’d been in a heap of trouble. Typically I would have broken up with a lover over my abusive behaviour, I would have fallen down drunk, passed out, hurt myself when I hit the ground. I would have been in a fight and been ejected from a pub or club. I would have lost my money and my car keys and sometimes my car. I lost my skateboard. I insulted friends. Smashed my car and did reckless, stupid and deeply irresponsible things. I’d sweep the streets on Tuesday morning, go home to my room in a pub or on a mate’s spare bed, take a shower, iron my shirt, get dressed, go to a café to load up on fruit salad, and then go to my office, hung-over, shaking and sweating pure alcohol, to represent my clients, thinking, Three days of this and then I’m back on the piss again. You beauty! The sun was always over my yard-arm.

  This was my life from 1996 to 2002.

  Go figure: for some reason, I’ve always had girlfriends, beautiful women who loved me and wanted to take care of me. I rewarded them with vicious and unreasonable behaviour. I couldn’t help myself. It always ended in tears.

  There was one woman I loved very much and it was painful when she left. We complemented each other well and when we were sober, for she was a drinker, too, we got on well. Her parting words to me were, ‘Steve, I’m not enough for you. With you, there’s always got to be something else. A girl who loves you for yourself is not enough.’

  Another lover who will stay in my heart was a sporty girl, but our relationship didn’t stand a chance against my drinking and dysfunctional ways. She wisely got out when she realised we had no future.

  I had relationships with women who forgave me. These beautiful women, today I call them my hostages, were needy and wanted my love, and I took advantage of that by treating them badly. No matter what I did, I thought they would never leave me, like my father and mother had done. Usually they stuck around for a while, did their best to put up with me, then threw up their hands and left me. I damaged them. Today, when I think of what I did to them, I shudder in my shame.

  In my lucid moments I realised that I was replicating the behaviour of my father. He chose the bottle over love. I did too. I wonder sometimes if I was trying to be like Dad because I loved him in spite of everything he’d done to our family. I made excuses for him, thinking that he wasn’t nasty, just weak. Everything was unresolved with me and my old man. I didn’t know why he left. Was it my fault? I went in search of him to get the connection. I tracked him down a couple of times when I was in my twenties, and even stayed with him, though our relations were awkward and tetchy. He lived at Marrickville with some woman. I was intrigued by him, and though he is long gone, I still am.

  My father died a bad death in 1997. He was in dreadful pain, alone and unloved. I made a kind of peace with him near the end. I didn’t recognise him when I walked into the room where he lay in bed, his ribs broken and lung punctured after a fall. His liver was riddled with cirrhosis, the alcoholic’s disease. Alison and I went to his funeral. James did not.

  I can see my old man with compassion. My brother, who hasn’t been to the dark places I have been, and where my father went, cannot understand why Dad abandoned us. He despises my father because of what he did to our family, because he hasn’t walked in his shoes. I have.

  In these dark days of my own life, 1996 to 2002, I became my father.

  One night I promised my lover I would not go to the pub. ‘Let’s stay in together,’ I said. ‘I’ll go to the local Indian takeaway in Darlinghurst and bring back dinner and we can watch Friday Night Football together.’ She said that sounded like fun, so off I went, saying I’d be back in half an hour. The best-laid plans … On my way to the Indian restaurant I ran into a mate who talked me into having a quick bourbon with him at the Green Park Hotel. At some stage that night as I got more and more drunk I thought to myself that I couldn’t go home now, the restaurant would be closed, the footy on the TV was long finished, my girlfriend would be furious with me, so – in for a penny, in for a pound – I may as well kick on. I arrived home on Sunday just before midday. My face was covered in scratches and I had a welt under my eye, I had lost all my money, and I was too drunk to speak.

  Only James, wonderful James, stood up to me. He had ruled me with a fist of iron since before Mum died, and I responded to that. Gentleness and praise cut no ice with me. I was only ever motivated by someone strong enough to come down hard on me. That’s how I answered the bell. Yet if James was tough, it was tough love that he was dispensing. He loved me unequivocally. For a long time, I believe, when I was in my late twenties and early thirties, he was in denial about my alcoholism, even though there were warnings.

  Extreme selfishness is another symptom of alcoholism. Without giving a thought to what it meant to James and his finances, I told him that I wanted him to buy me out of the house we co-owned in Randwick. I explained that I needed the money because I wanted to join a girl I was in love with in Europe, where she was holidaying. I said, ‘If you give me twelve grand now, I’ll sign my share of the house over to you.’ Of course in the years since we’d bought it, the house had greatly increased in value, even though the bank owned most of it, and my whim was going to cost me a fortune. I didn’t care. I wanted to join my girlfriend in Europe and I wanted to join her now. James tried to talk me out of it but I insisted. He threw up his hands in despair and said, ‘Sure.’

  I regret inconveniencing James, and I regret losing a pile of money, but going to Europe is one of the few things I did in my binge-drinking years that I don’t regret. My memories of that trip will last forever.

  It seemed that one minute I was rolling around in a Darlinghurst gutter, and the next I was sitting in a café in Paris, surrounded by beautiful historic buildings, wide boulevards and sophisticated, well-dressed people. And there beside me was my girl.

  When my bill came it was the equivalent of $8 for one coffee! I asked the waitress why it was so expensive. She explained, in English because I spoke no French, that if you sit down you get charged more. In future I stood.

  We travelled around Paris, walking in the parks and chilling out in the cafés. Then we split up for a while and I travelled alone to some of the most beautiful destinations on Earth: I got pissed in Venice, Florence, the Amalfi Coast in Italy, then in the south of France. I had my drink spiked in a Genoa nightclub and when I woke up lying in the street outside, my wallet containing $2000 worth of lira was missing. I lay in my hotel room for three days, too sick to move. I consumed only mineral water and finally flushed the poison from my system. When I was well enough, I travelled on and rendezvoused with my lover. And of course I started drinking again.

  Then, after I returned and was going out with another girl, she, James and I were playing pool together at the Paddington Green Hotel one afternoon, and she said to James, ‘Steve has just drunk five bourbons in an hour. I think he might be an alcoholic.’ James said, ‘What are you talking about? No way.’ After 1996, he could have been in no doubt.

  By that stage I didn’t socialise that much with my brother. We moved in different circles, and his circle was a lo
t more respectable than mine.

  Once, after I had got into trouble and was facing charges of drunken affray, a judge told me that he believed my feeling of abandonment was so intense that I couldn’t stand the pain and alcohol had become my anaesthetic. He said that I lashed out at the world that had hurt me by getting drunk, fighting, and letting loved ones down, and that I tried to get people’s attention by stuffing up. He may have had a point. That may all have been a part of my problem.

  People could see me in all my drunken ingloriousness four days a week at any of the Eastern Suburbs and city night spots that would still let me in their doors, and as time went on even these establishments dwindled to a handful. Word got around that I was a drunkard, and I had worried phone calls from my father figures, men who loved me such as Bruce Collins, Johnny Lewis, Chris Murphy and Bruce Farthing. They would ask me, ‘Sunshine, why are you doing this to yourself?’

  Somehow, don’t ask me how, I served a term on the board of the PCYC in the late 1990s. I don’t think I could have been a particularly valuable board member. Once, after a night on the bourbon, I ended up sleeping it off on an exercise mat down at the club. Next morning at about eleven, for some reason Johnny Lewis came to the club and saw me lying there unconscious still dressed in my suit and smelling of booze. He woke me gently and said sorrowfully, ‘Stevie, you’re breaking my heart.’ I tried to tell him I was all right but passed out before I could get the words out. When I sobered up, the encounter roared back into my brain, and Johnny’s despair, sad and resigned, hit me like a punch to the guts.

  After a big booze binge I would return to work in a state of dread. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to function. My head would be pounding, my mouth dry, my voice a rasp, my shirt drenched with sweat. I’d want to curl up in a dark space and die but I’d try to hang in there, stand up in court, get my head around my brief because my client was counting on me, and wait for the pain to subside and the moment when I could have that next drink.