The Feel-Good Hit of the Year

by Liam Pieper

  Ardian stepped forward. ‘It’s not like you’re a great student. You don’t bring home the grades, and you’re not really making a lot of cash from this, so you may as well give it up and do some fucking homework.’

  He was only half right. I was a terrible student: precocious but also smart-arsed and lazy. I was, however, making a fortune, at least compared to my classmates. I tried to explain this to my family, starting with words before fetching a paper and pen to supply a diagram of the logistics.

  I’d stepped up my operation after the first few months, when my business had expanded to the point where I couldn’t handle it on my own any more. I took my ounce bags of weed and divided them into quarters to sell on to other dealers who I’d subcontracted. I would give the bags to a roster of neighbourhood burnouts who would then on-sell the product and pay me the wholesale price. It cut down on travel time and reduced my risk by some margin.

  It also plumped up my little ego. I’d found that people gave me respect, or what looked very much like respect, for having the chutzpah to flout the law, and that in turn gave me the confidence to step up my game. I handed out bags of dope along with platitudes about life on the street that I’d learned from Wu-Tang records, and bristled with pride when my underlings nodded and scurried off to do my bidding.

  I didn’t keep weed in the house and only had it in my possession for a few hours at a time. Anything I had to hold on to for more than a day or two was stashed at a friend’s place, for which I paid him a retainer. On the rare occasion I got into trouble, I had people who would sort it out for a small amount of money or else they took payment in trade.

  Some of my team offered to pay me in kind: pills, bags of speed, bushels of raw tobacco they’d scored from the Philip Morris factory. While I would occasionally pass these goodies on to friends who’d asked for them specifically, they held no interest for me. I partly assumed I would learn to enjoy them once I was a little older and my tastes had matured, as with asparagus, but for now I felt too young.

  I knew my parents would disapprove, and I very much wanted to make them proud of me, so I ran them through my operation. While I was showing them how much I could make in a week with just a few deals, Dad came to see things from my point of view. He was a crusading moralist at times, but a miser first and foremost. Our salad days had given him a religious appreciation for the value of a dollar, and he was magnificently thrifty. I was with him in 1992 when he lost a $50 note he’d saved to have a pair of shoes mended and, even now, whenever he glazes over with a look of Proustian sorrow, I know he’s thinking about that fifty bucks.

  Throughout my youth, Dad’s one concession to drifting into the middle class was a keenness for the stock market. He loved the Dow Jones as only a fading liberal can, and he was good at using it to spin nothing into money. When Telstra was floated in 1997 he bought me a couple of hundred bucks’ of stock and spelt out the mechanics of the market to me the way another dad might have taught his son to shave or fish or fight. Dad was a bohemian – he dressed in rags, drove a battered old Toyota Camry and only really bought books and records – but that didn’t mean he didn’t appreciate money. He wasn’t happy that I was pushing drugs, but he admired the economics of the cottage-industry mafia I was at the helm of.

  He sat down and ran through the sums with me, carefully double-checking the profit margins.

  ‘When you buy in this amount, how much does an ounce cost you?’ he asked. I named a figure.

  He smiled. ‘And what would it cost me?’

  So I started selling weed to my parents. It worked out okay. Turns out they didn’t mind that I was selling drugs as long as it looked as though I was doing my homework, I kept the gear away from the house, and I gave them easy access to cheap, good-quality weed. There’s nothing worse than coming home from a hard day at work and having to meet some pissant dealer in a freezing park when all you want to do is get dinner on the table and settle in on the couch for the evening.

  Keeping it in the family had its perks for me too. For one thing, they knew how to speak in code over the phone. As a rule of thumb, you want to keep any phone discussions of illegal activities vague and nebulous, or at least substitute terms such as ‘drug’ and ‘deal’ with code words. It’s especially helpful if it all ends up in court. Although, in later years, criminal lawyer friends of mine would laugh themselves silly at transcripts of incongruous, hack-ish codes, such as the guy who would call his dealer late on a Saturday to order ‘twenty-eight dresses’. Some clients got the hang of it fairly quickly, but I was amazed at how many people were unable to grasp the simplest code. To a client who was after ecstasy, for example, I might have said, ‘Just tell me you want to borrow a CD. I’ll know what you mean.’ Then they would call me a few days later with, ‘Hey, Liam! It’s me! You know! I bought those CDs from you the other day. Anyway, I’m going to a rave this weekend and I need some CDs. Only I need a lot, so could I get maybe a ten-pack of CDs? And those last CDs were kind of speedy so could you throw in another half a CD? And also do you know where I could find a gram of coke?’, by which time I’d hung up in exasperation, and the police were speeding around to my house with a battering ram.

  Mum at least knew how to talk in gangster slang. Anyone who’s spent a couple of decades getting high picks up the trick of talking casually about contraband. If Mum wanted to buy a bag, she would call and ask, ‘Hey, Liam, have you seen my umbrella?’

  To which I would reply, ‘The big one?’

  ‘No, the little one. The one your father uses at the weekend.’ And I would bring home a quarter bag of grass. See how easy that is?

  So helping Mum and Dad to score was ideal, as far as I could see, although it made negotiating pocket money awkward. I thought I should get more as I was dealing to them at cost price, but they didn’t see it that way. In the end, I took it as an overhead. I had plenty of pocket money anyway.

  Selling drugs wasn’t all smiles and sunshine. Because I spent most of my time brokering deals, I never did my homework. My grades crashed and my teachers quickly went from viewing me as a bright but indolent kid to a no-good shitkicker. Not that this changed how they acted towards me: the majority of the teachers was pretty jaded and treated every kid as a no-good shitkicker. Occasionally I’d get a young, idealistic English teacher who would get excited by an essay I wrote, before realising they didn’t have a Dead Poets Society situation on their hands and going back to having the life bled out of them and writing poetry on trams. Every maths teacher hated me right off the bat, but I didn’t mind; I had the small-business owner’s disdain for any maths I couldn’t do on a mobile-phone calculator.

  My grades only bothered me at report-card time, when my folks would get furious beyond all proportion. I never understood why: they’d raised me to be anti-establishment and, besides, I didn’t really have any ambitions that required good grades.

  My only real goal in high school was to get next to Lilly. My crush on her had only worsened as we inched towards the later years of high school, and while we had become friends we wanted different things from the friendship. She wanted someone with whom to drink goon and talk about putting a curse on the popular girls. I wanted her to marry me and move somewhere in the Byron shire where we could raise sheep and a couple of dozen apple-cheeked children. That was the long play but I figured I would start with some earnest kissing and finger-banging.

  For her part, she let me down gently, indicating that while she would probably never feel the same way, she was happy to be my friend and to help me consume the buckets of drugs I kept under the bed, against the express wishes of my parents. My personal stash was in a battered, combination-lock briefcase, away from prying eyes and from the sticky fingers of my little brother, who was starting to appreciate the virtue of free money on demand.

  In a misguided effort to impress Lilly, I’d also softened my stance on party drugs. Most lunchtimes she and I would head from school to my house, where we would eat a sandwich, drink a litre or two of c
ask wine, and then take a little something, usually half a pill each of ecstasy, to prop us up in that afternoon’s classes.

  I understood that Lilly wasn’t interested in me romantically, but I was sure that if I could just kiss her the once it would change her mind. I reasoned that the best way to make that happen was to give her enough ecstasy that she’d fall in love with me by default. Everyone knows there’s nothing sexier than adolescent boys sweating and grinding their jaws while they spout gibberish. It never did work out, no matter how high we got. During our lunch hours together, I’d act steamily towards her – not like a Latin romantic, more like a dumpling. I was clammy and pale, a thin white skin covering meat of dubious provenance. I learned that filling someone to the gills with ecstasy might mean they will hold hands with you, but it won’t make them fall in love.

  The only real outcome was that my teachers started to notice that I often came to class drunk and high. I thought I was being surreptitious, gurning and frothing at the mouth throughout remedial maths, but no one was fooled. Ms R, young and passionate about her job, asked me to stay after class one afternoon. In a low, concerned voice she questioned how much pot I was smoking.

  ‘Oh, none!’ I told her truthfully, my eyes as wide as saucers. ‘None at all!’ And I twitched out of the classroom as though I’d pulled off some magnificent heist.

  The twice-yearly parent–teacher interviews were the only other times my parents got on my case about studying, and it was only so they could get off school grounds quickly. They hated parent–teacher night with a passion and got ready for it the same way my friends prepared to go home to their parents when they were stoned: a cup of strong coffee to sober up, Visine Clear for bloodshot eyes, a healthy spray of deodorant to cloak the smoke. Then we would drive towards the school’s halogen-lit gym, in which the three of us would shuffle around, waiting to be told off by teachers. In Year 10 my geography teacher, Mr D, took my parents aside to have a frank talk.

  ‘I’m concerned about Liam’s attitude,’ he said.

  ‘We’re also concerned about Liam’s attitude,’ said Dad. Mum nodded.

  I glared at Dad. Traitor! I thought. Fucking turncoat!

  Mr D went on: ‘Liam doesn’t seem to have the necessary curiosity about how the world works to become a decent student.’

  ‘He has never been a curious boy,’ Dad agreed wistfully.

  I was livid. ‘What am I supposed to be curious about?’ I snapped. ‘It’s geography! Maps! What’s to know? It’s not going to change on my watch.’

  Mr D swivelled to look at me with the slow, dumb malevolence of a sideshow clown head. He fixed his gaze on me. ‘My primary concern is Liam’s obvious disrespect for authority.’

  ‘We’ve tried to teach Liam to respect authority but he’s at an age when it’s very hard,’ said Dad. Mum was nodding so hard I was worried her head would bisect and tumble off like in a Monty Python animation.

  Mr D sighed. ‘That may be, but Liam is not that young any more. We’re heading into VCE, and I think it may be too late for him.’

  Dad turned to look at me, his eyes full of sorrow. ‘I have to agree. You’ve left your run a bit late, Liam.’

  Mum said, ‘Yep.’ I sat there, cowed.

  Back in the car, Mum and Dad burst out laughing.

  ‘Mr D!’ crowed Dad. ‘What a wanker!’

  I sat in the back fuming. I’ll show them, I thought, and upped my price on the ounce.

  7

  Looking back, maybe selling the occasional bag to my folks wasn’t in the best interests of the family. They didn’t think it was fair of me to charge them the full rate while I was living under their roof, and I didn’t think it was fair that they expected discounts when the convenience of having a dealer downstairs was an unmatchable perk. It must have made raising me a fucking nightmare. It’s hard to get your kid to eat their veggies when you’ve fallen behind on your drug debt to them.

  My business also made me at least partially to blame for Hamish getting into pot. Your classic spoiled youngest child, he not only had the best toys and video games, he also never had to risk his allowance by sneaking Mum’s dope or pulling the elaborate heist that required. Instead he could just pop into my room while I was out and nick as much pot and pocket money as he wanted. I had no idea, mind you. I only twigged that he even knew what weed was after the school busted him.

  Hamish had only just started high school, his hand-me-down uniform still baggy on him, when he was caught selling joints on the back oval by a teacher. They called the cops, who marched him through the school, searched his locker, found his pot and arrested him in front of the milling crowd before taking him down to the station. I was struggling through a biology test when a teacher’s aide stuck her head around the door to tell me they were taking Hamish to the cop shop, and could I meet him there.

  He got off with a warning, but he was miffed about all the pageantry. ‘They didn’t have to arrest me in front of everybody. I guess they were trying to humiliate me,’ he said, sighing. ‘Idiots.’

  If the big show of arresting him in front of his peers was meant to deter Hamish, it didn’t work. Rather, the whole junior school now knew who to go to when they wanted to score weed.

  While it was surprising to have to head down to the police station to sign him out, the incident seemed natural, part of life’s progression, like I think I need to start shaving, or I reckon the old lemon tree is on its last legs, or Oh, Hamish gets high now.

  Ardian was interested in my goods as well, complicating the already strained fraternal relationship, with one brother entering adolescence, one leaving it. Ardian had moved out of home and gone to university, where he was trying to cut back on weed, an almost impossible task when living in a share house with one or more arts students in it. I wasn’t helping: I was a soft touch and always gave him pot when he asked. He was my brother, after all, and at any point he could have Chinese-burned me into submission.

  He used to come around at weekends, loudly swear off weed and criticise me for selling drugs, which he saw as making money from other people’s misery. ‘You’re an amoral little shit,’ he would tell me. ‘And karma is going to come back and bite you on the arse.’ A few hours later, he would call to ask me if he could grab a gram.

  ‘You told me not to sell you any more weed,’ I’d complain. ‘You were quite certain about it. You called me amoral.’

  ‘I asked you not to sell me any more weed,’ he’d counter, and then continue in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘There’s a beautiful girl here who wants to get high and spend the night with me. I want you to sell her a gram.’ Every fiend ran that line, or something like it. There was always some extenuating circumstance that required another gram, another quarter, another time.

  All my clients, sooner or later, would want drugs ‘on tick’, which meant ‘on loan’, which, between my memory not being great and my being too craven to demand payment, usually meant ‘for free’. In the end, I refused all tick out of principle. I used to envy the street pushers on TV who didn’t have to be friends with their clients, who didn’t feel guilty about refusing somebody tick.

  I lost friends over it. Or rather, not friends but people I was friendly with; I couldn’t always tell the difference. One night I was walking back from a bad meeting with a client I’d scored for. He was a regular, a slightly older guy who liked to take pills and stay up playing computer games. I’d handed over the pills without thinking, and he’d popped them there and then. Once they were safely in his tummy, he’d told me he had no cash and that he’d pay me back the next week. I’d argued with him some but there wasn’t much I could do, short of beating him up and taking his wallet. I’d never hit anyone before and I wasn’t about to start now. He was a nice kid but socially awkward, the kind who lives somewhere on the autism spectrum and at every party ends up in the kitchen, talking to the dog.

  I walked home seething with rage, kicking myself for not being more assertive. One of my drug suppliers, an experienc
ed, well-built guy, had given me some advice on the practice of ticking drugs. He’d give any customer the benefit of the doubt once but the second time they didn’t pay, he would fuck them up, leave some visible bruises. He assured me that you don’t have to do it often before people get the message. I couldn’t see that working for me. I still slept with the lights on, because of ghosts, and kept a copy of The Hobbit on my bedside table. Fucking people up wasn’t in my wheelhouse.

  I was mulling over his words when my old buddy Sam called, asking for tick. We’d been drifting apart for years, as I spent all my time flitting about the suburbs and he hung out in his room, smoking cones and listening to trance. He told me that he had an exam that he was stressed out about, and he didn’t have any money but just wanted enough weed to calm him down enough so he could study. It was a version of an excuse I’d heard from my brother and my parents. I lost my temper and yelled at him: he should take some responsibility for himself, not get himself into the position where he couldn’t afford something he needed. He started yelling back, then crying. I laughed at Sam, telling him to call me the next day once he had got his shit together and found some money. Then I hung up. That was the last time I ever spoke to him.

  That night, around 11 p.m., the client from earlier knocked on my door. His pills had worn off and he wanted some weed to come down – again, on tick. I was furious. I made it quite clear to my clients never to come near the house, but they didn’t listen. I was angry but instead of the bitter, guilty anger I’d been stewing in all night, this was good, clean fury.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Let’s take a walk.’

  We strolled together to the park, on some pretext. Halfway into the darkness, he asked where we were going.

  ‘To have a chat.’

  The penny dropped. I could see the realisation on his face, then the fear that flashed across it a second later.