by Larry Writer
In a weird way, being a drunk came in handy at work when I was representing clients with a similar problem. Being an expert in the condition enabled me to help them. I was able to empathise with Jeff Harding when his drinking saw him face charges. I had another client who had a serious drinking problem. He knew it, I knew it, and it was destroying his life, but he was in denial. This fellow blamed everyone else for the fact that his life was in ruins. His wife, his kids, his boss, his doctor, his psychiatrist, the cops who he said had it in for him … I knew better, and gave him both barrels: ‘Mate, you have given me every reason under the sun why your life is in the toilet and you’re up on charges for the eighth time. There is one reason: alcohol. Beat that and you can survive.’
I was not capable of taking my own advice. The simple fact was that I was an alcoholic, and I couldn’t stop drinking because I didn’t want to stop. I was on the slide and I just didn’t care. I knew very well that the booze was harming my career, my relationships and my reputation. I was flirting with disaster. I drove when drunk and I got into fights in which I could have killed someone or been killed myself. I would wake up knowing that I was destroying myself and knowing that I could not call a halt to my drinking because I was enjoying it too much.
I was a barfly who would collar another drinker and say, ‘Did I ever tell you about the time when …’ in the hope of being bought a bourbon and Coke. Then, as the drink took hold, my amiable façade would fall away and I’d become a nasty drunk and my audience would get the hell out of there. I’d do anything to get a drink when I was bingeing.
Occasionally I was hospitalised after a drunken incident and put in the ward with other alcoholics. I saw my alcoholic brothers drink from a bedpan they’d convinced a visiting mate to fill with scotch to trick the nurses. I saw a man drink his own urine that he had ground sausages into from his hospital meal because he had convinced himself that the combination tasted like rum. I saw men drink perfume, embalming fluid and metho. I was a poor desperate bastard just like them.
From 1994 to 1996, I ran the bistro at the Strawberry Hills Hotel part time. That was like putting the fox in charge of the hen house. I had a good clientele of drinking mates, sports stars, journos from the News Limited building down the road, and the legal fraternity. When I was not serving up grilled octopus and veal parmigiana, the specialties of the house, I was helping myself to the contents of the fridge.
For a while, too, I left the law altogether and accepted another of James’s invitations to join him in the real estate game. He tried to get me into shape. He organised for me to work out with a professional trainer and bought me some sharp clothes. He knew I was drinking too much and this was his way of helping me. At that stage he thought all it would take for me to resolve my problems was to change my appearance. He learned that wasn’t nearly enough. I decided I’d rather drink than conform to James’s idea of how I should be, and I quit.
My relationship with my brother was always raw. When we lived together, in Woolloomooloo and later in Dangar Street and, for a short time in 1998, in Stephen Street, Randwick, he had always tried to be both parent and mate to me. He simultaneously treated me like a king and like a naughty child. At Stephen Street, my drinking was bad and getting worse, so to try to pull me into line he lectured me about how drinking would ruin my life and he checked up on me constantly, always asking where I’d been for the last four days when I arrived home on a Tuesday morning. I assured him I was fine and working hard and was not drinking. He didn’t believe me. He would confiscate my wages from my sweeping job and my law practice and put them towards our mortgage and food and living expenses. In 1997, I got $1200 for defending a guy on a drink-driving charge. James asked me how much I’d earned and I told him $600. I gave him that and got drunk and gambled away the rest.
Once, not long after James had heard of some drunken behaviour I’d got myself mixed up in, he laid down the law and told me I was on my last warning. If I got drunk and embarrassed the family name again he would boot me out. I promised him I’d change my ways. The following Friday night I rolled home legless drunk at around 8 pm. I couldn’t fit my key in the key hole in the front door. Finally, I succeeded in getting in and staggered into the lounge room. I was a smelly, incoherent, stumbling mess. Sitting on the couch were James and his girlfriend. I later learned that James had been telling her how proud he was of me for turning over a new leaf. I had let him down. His expression changed from one of shock to fury. Drunk as I was, my heart sank. He said, ‘Get out! Just get out!’ I slunk to the wardrobe, took out my one suit and a pair of shoes, a couple of ties, a shirt, my signed photo of the boxer Jake ‘ The Snake’ Rodriguez and my old boxing gloves and dumped everything else I owned in the bin, and I left.
That night I slept on the floor at my friend Dominic D’Ettorre’s place. Dom offered me his couch but I felt so low I told him thanks but I’d feel more at home on the floor. That floor was my bed for three months.
I then moved into a room at the Crest Hotel in Kings Cross. The shame of James casting me out just made me want to drink all the harder.
I cut a deal with the concierge at the Crest. He cleaned and made up my room for $300 a week. A friend who worked at the pub did me a favour and stacked my fridge with vodka and bourbon. It was paradise for a drunk like me. I had a spate of clients, and there was money from the bistro and street-sweeping. I was making money and I was out of control on the drink. Every night you could find me at the Xu bar at the top of Kings Cross near the big Coca-Cola sign. The barman there knew me and treated me like a bigshot. The Xu was a nostalgia trip for me. It used to be a barber shop, Angelo de Marco’s Hairdressing Salon, where I hung out when I was a boy. Angelo used to say, ‘Hey, Steve, if you don’t want a haircut, get off the chair.’ Now it was the barman saying, ‘Hey, Steve, if you don’t want another drink, get off the stool.’
It seemed I couldn’t go out drinking without getting into a fight. Sometimes I picked the fight, other times a rough-nut in a pub would see me lurching around and try to have a bit of fun with me. One evening I was at the Clovelly Hotel, in one of the bars there, with a girlfriend, when I saw a mate. I waved at him and shouted something in a loud, slurring voice. A bouncer was standing between us and he thought I was shouting at him. He was huge, with Arnold Schwarzenegger muscles and a shaved head. He stared holes in me. I thought, What’s he looking at? and decided that if he didn’t stop staring I’d belt him. That was how clearly I was thinking after a dozen or so drinks. I glared back at the bouncer, and mouthed an obscenity. He strode over and tried to throw me out. I told him, ‘Fuck off, or I’ll knock you right out.’ He grabbed me by the throat and lifted me 10 centimetres off the ground. I tried to break his grip and we started wrestling there in the bar. Three more bouncers ran in. One king-hit me from behind. They manhandled me out of the pub and threw me down the front steps into the street. As I was flying through the air I grabbed two and took them with me. I was punching, kicking and biting. We all fell in a heap. One bouncer pulled my jumper up over my head, a second stamped on my hands, a third kicked me, and a fourth beat the living daylights out of me.
When I was finally spent and helpless, the bald bouncer told me the cops had been called and this was my chance to run for it. I replied, ‘I’m not going anywhere, mate. I’m staying right here till the police arrive and then I’m gonna charge you bastards with assault.’ Three officers arrived and took statements from all of us and a couple of witnesses, but no charges were ever laid. My girlfriend took me straight to hospital where I was stitched and treated.
I returned to the Cloey the next week, when I’d recovered a little from my beating, to sort out the bouncer who had started the trouble. Yes, once more I’d had a few drinks. I wanted an apology. I went straight up to the bouncer and said, ‘Mate, do you remember me?’ He said he did, and that while he regretted what had happened, he had done nothing wrong and so had no reason to say sorry. I said, ‘Mate, I looked at you sideways and you and your mates bash
ed me. You owe me an apology for that and if I don’t get it I’ll do something about it right now.’ It got heated between us, but this time it didn’t get physical – nor did I receive my apology. Telling myself I had regained my lost honour, I left. Soon after, two detectives came around to my room at the Crest. They charged me with assaulting the bouncers.
In court the magistrate said he wanted to strip me of my licence to practise law but he’d leave that to another day. While the judgment was being handed down in the courtroom a teacher from my old school, St Mary’s, who had always told me I’d end up in jail, came into the courtroom with a group of students on an excursion. He saw me in the dock and gave me an I-told-you-so smirk.
I moved out of the Crest and lived with mates and girlfriends. I was homeless. I was a gypsy, carting my small stash of precious belongings from place to place. I was happy floating about, getting drunk, causing mayhem. I didn’t know how to live properly, because I had never been given any rules, not having parents who were in a position to impose them. I did as I pleased, and there were enough hangers-on who seemed to enjoy my company, reinforcing my bad behaviour. I didn’t dare contact James.
Drinking was always on my mind, no matter what I was doing. But I’d worn out my welcome at so many pubs and bars all over town that I found myself having to go further afield to have a drink, where they didn’t know me, and then my fighting and yahooing would get me barred from there too. I was not alone in my alcoholism. I saw heavy ceaseless drinking everywhere in that lost period. Often I would be in a pub, three sheets to the wind, and I’d hear a bloke on the phone to his wife, ‘Yeah, don’t worry, darling, I’ll be home by eight to put the kids to bed.’ And, you know, they’d still be at the bar, drinking with me, at midnight. And you know something else, I’d be there to see them falling down and getting shoved out the door at closing time because I’d be getting shoved out too. Some of my girlfriends misguidedly wanted to have children with me. Maybe they thought it would curb my wildness. I always said no. I would have been a terrible dad. At that stage of my life I would have chosen drink over the kids, just like my father did, every single time.
Working at the Strawberry Hills Hotel, I befriended Tony Hines, a long-haired, heavily tattooed, buffed and handsome thug who a few years later would be shot to death. Tony could be charming and he could be a violent psychopath. I went with him one night to the Blue Room, a slinky nightclub on Oxford Street. After the Blue Room we moved on to another club in a pub called the Freezer. Standing in the line waiting to get in, Tony picked a fight with a little red-haired bloke. The redhead refused to be intimidated by the bigger and more muscular Tony. They went to a vacant service station, stripped to the waist and fought. Tony kept knocking his adversary down and kicking him with his heavy boots, but each time the little guy climbed back to his feet and whaled away at Tony. Meanwhile, I was holding off the redhead’s mates, from time to time trading punches with a group of them. I was drunk, feeling no pain, and I could have kept it up all night. I dished out some punishment, and copped plenty for my quarter. This went on for around thirty minutes. In the end, Tony and his enemy looked at each other, grinned, shook hands and strolled off into the night with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Hostilities came to a halt between me and the four or five friends. We looked at each other, shrugged, and called it a night. We too shook hands. Just another day at the office.
For a time, after the night I couldn’t get my key in the door, James and I avoided each other. We’d speak occasionally on the phone. He obviously still cared for me and was worried sick about me. It wasn’t one single thing that destroyed our brotherly bond. It was a series of drunken incidents I’d been involved in. James for some time had been getting bombarded with calls from friends telling him what a disaster I was when I was on the grog. An accumulation of atrocities in pubs and clubs, on the streets, and in the apartment in which James had generously organised for me to stay proved to him that I was my father all over again.
In 1998, James wrote me a letter, which I have kept in my wallet to this day to remind me of how far I fell. Each time I unfold it and read it I am filled with remorse that I could have aroused such feelings of disgust in the brother I love so much.
S. Dack,
Edgecliff Rd,
Woollahra 2025.
This letter has been difficult for me to write. The amount of heartache that you have caused me has been almost unbearable. You have a major problem. I get constant reports about your attitude, aggressive behaviour, foul language, gambling, drinking, lying, not repaying money borrowed, not settling debts, spending all your money on alcohol and food and your seedy mates and then borrowing money from other people when bills come in.
I was told recently about you smoking opium at [night club] and you probably don’t even remember being there.
The neighbours in the building are shocked by your sick behaviour and complain constantly.
I don’t want to talk with you or see you any more. Do not attempt to call me or communicate with me because I don’t want you to have anything to do with my life in the future. You have had every opportunity and have failed to either respond or even thank anyone around you. You’re 34 and you need professional help. You have no respect for anybody, particularly yourself.
You are now in the same category as was your father. I will have nothing to do with you, as I had nothing to do with him. You can count on that.
In short, I am ashamed of you and you make me sick. Your mother’s memory is constantly being tarnished by your actions. Good luck for the future, you’ll need it.
PS: Don’t contact me, I warn you.
James Dack.
[JAMES]
cutting ties
By 1998, I was at the end of my tether with Steve. I had given him love and money (even though he didn’t even have a bank account) and a job, I’d bought him clothes and hired a personal trainer to stop him going to seed. I did his laundry and fed him. I put a roof over his head. I gave him thousands of dollars. I got him off the hook when he bashed people. I didn’t realise that material things were not going to cut it. He was an alcoholic and he needed professional help to beat his addiction. I was always one who had no trouble putting down my glass and going home when I felt I’d had enough to drink. With Steve, as he was fond of saying, one drink was too many and too many were never enough. He was the victim of a disease and I couldn’t, at that time, get that fact through my head. It was like saying to someone with cancer, ‘Come on, snap out of it, get over your cancer.’ As if cancer sufferers – or alcoholics – have a choice.
Steve threw everything I gave him back in my face. His drinking was out of control. He seemed intent on killing himself. Not a week went by when I didn’t hear from a friend of some new drunken event. A fight, a car smash, unpaid loans, good friends let down. There were whispers of drugs.
Steve’s behaviour was giving a whole bunch of his friends, a lot of whom were old buddies from Woolloomooloo, the opportunity to ring me and gloat about his various crimes and misdemeanours. ‘Guess what Stevie’s done now …’ they’d say with undisguised glee. Some people were genuinely concerned for his welfare; a lot were not. They were revelling in somebody being in worse shape than themselves – the same ones who no matter what Steve achieved in rugby league and boxing and the law always tried to pull him down to their level. It gave them a thrill to be able to call me at work and give me the latest instalment about my brother. They were not only dragging Steve into the muck, they were dragging me down, too, and revealing something about themselves into the bargain.
Every time my phone rang I shivered with fear, sure it would be someone with another tale of something terrible Steve had done.
I owned three apartments in a block in Edgecliff Road, Woollahra, and I was letting Steve stay in one. There was a call from a resident of the block: ‘James, your brother is throwing things out of the window and making loud noise all night. He’s always drunk and aggressive. There are violent arg
uments going on there. This used to be a peaceful place until he moved in.’ I evicted Steve and sold all three apartments.
One day I answered the phone and recognised the voice of a good friend on the line. ‘Mate, you’d better sit down because I’ve got some bad news.’
My immediate thought was, ‘Steve’s dead.’ I’d been expecting such a call for a long time. But I said to the caller, ‘Mate, I’m not going to sit down. You tell me what you’ve got to tell me.’
In fact, Steve wasn’t dead. My mate Alan Ferguson was. Alan, the kid whose rugby league skills had blown me away, who’d stuck up for me when I was being bullied at school, who made my spirits soar every time we were together. In a way, my initial fear was kind of correct. Alan wasn’t a blood brother, but he was a brother. He’d died of a heart attack, brought on by years of drinking.
I went straight around to his home and comforted his wife and their two children and his parents. I tried to do for the Fergusons what John Ireland had done for me when Mum died.
I thought back to the last time I saw Alan, a month or so before his death. We’d both been invited to a friend’s fortieth birthday party, and I turned up late, around ten-thirty. By this time, Alan had had too much to drink. My despair for him and my anger over what Steve was doing to himself boiled up in me. I grabbed Alan by the collar and put my face right in his. ‘Listen, mate, you’re going to fucking die if you don’t stop doing this to yourself. You’ve got a gorgeous wife and two beautiful kids. Wake up!’ I bundled him into my car and drove him to his house. I helped him inside and he assured me he was going to have a shower and go to bed. He did have a shower, but he didn’t go to bed. He returned to the party and continued drinking. I learned he was still at it at seven-thirty the next morning.
