The Feel-Good Hit of the Year

by Liam Pieper

  Lacoste picked up the box and dipped a finger into it. He tasted it and then asked me what it was.

  ‘That’s energy powder,’ I said. It crossed my mind that ‘energy powder’ sounded an awful lot like slang for crystal meth. But, then again, so do most things.

  ‘What do you use it for?’

  ‘I put it on my breakfast cereal.’

  ‘Why is it under your bed?’

  ‘I like to have breakfast in bed,’ I said, inspired.

  ‘So you put it on your cereal? You don’t use speed or coke?’

  ‘Are you crazy? Do you know how much that would cost? I don’t know how much you guys make but I don’t have that kind of money.’

  They boxed it up and took it as evidence anyway.

  Once they were done turning the house upside down, the cops carried the boxes of evidence out to the cars. I sat on the stoop and fretted. My first jolt of adrenaline was fading and I was starting to think more clearly, which wasn’t calming. Any way I quantified it, I was in deep trouble. They had been thorough in collecting every bit of evidence against me but I’d had two pieces of luck: firstly, they hadn’t seized my ledger; and, secondly, in confusing a middle-aged homemaker for a drug lord, they’d neglected to search my person. In my pocket, next to a packet of Dunhills, my mobile phone was loaded with incriminating numbers and text messages. I had to find some way to lose that before I was processed. I looked across to the cop charged with keeping an eye on me. He shifted to meet my eyes.

  ‘Do you mind if I have a cigarette?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t care. Got one for me?’

  I tapped out a Dunhill for each of us. ‘Do you have a light?’

  He nodded and produced a lighter. He lit mine first, then his. While the cop was lighting his, figuring his night vision would be thrown by the flame, I pulled out my phone and tossed it behind me so that it landed in the long grass that grew around the doorstep. For a heartbeat I was sure he’d noticed, but he just snapped his lighter off and pocketed it.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  He gave a dismissive wave with his cigarette, then moved away a little, all while watching me.

  Finally, the cops were done. They escorted me to the back of an unmarked station wagon and drove me down to the Moorabbin police complex for processing. They fingerprinted me before taking me into a tiny, cluttered room with a measuring decal on one wall. A new cop, one I didn’t recognise, produced a camera and took a picture. ‘Turn to your left,’ he said. I turned to my right, and then, realising my mistake, started to spin, just as the camera went off, ruining the shot. The cop exploded: ‘You trying to be a smartarse, fuckhead?’

  ‘No, sir,’ I said meekly. I turned to the left, then to the right, and he took two more shots. Years later I discovered that I wasn’t obliged to be photographed and it was within my rights to sabotage the shot. The cop must have thought my twitching was a clever attempt to cheat the system, rather than terror-based spasticity.

  Then the interview started. I was moved into a small room, maybe 5 metres square. It didn’t look like an interrogation room from a movie, with cups of coffee and bribes of donuts and cigarettes from the good cop, and a two-way mirror with a feisty DA pacing behind it. There were no dark concrete walls blasted with light from a high-wattage interrogation lamp. Instead, with its worn carpet, cheap wood-particle table, plastic chairs and humming fluorescents, the room was exactly like those airless portable classrooms from high school.

  Indeed, there was a general first-day-at-school feeling to the whole set-up: the two pissed-off authority figures staring at me over the table, and my sitting there awkwardly, ignorant of procedure, terrified of getting the etiquette wrong. I sat back in the chair and straightened up to make myself look taller, but then my feet didn’t reach the ground. I swung them nervously back and forth under the chair.

  I was terrified and when I’m nervous – on a date or about to get into a fight, for example – I have a bad habit of making jokes.

  ‘So . . . do you come here often?’ I tried.

  Lacoste rolled his eyes. ‘Let’s get on with this, okay?’ He placed an old-fashioned tape recorder on the table and pressed down the button.

  Lacoste spoke, identifying the officers and me as being present in the room.

  Lacoste: Now, you’ve been found in possession of a trafficable quantity of a controlled substance . . .

  LP (agreeable, happy to help): Yep!

  Lacoste: Along with scales, small plastic bags and other equipment consistent with dealing drugs . . .

  LP (impatiently): Yes. Yep.

  Lacoste: Have you been dealing drugs?

  LP: For sure!

  In my head I had already formulated a defence, which was, loosely: Yes, I am a drug dealer but only because I am a drug addict. I was using cannabis to self-medicate for the pain and trauma I felt over my brother’s recent death. In truth, I didn’t care for weed and hadn’t touched it in months, but I thought that breaking the law to support my tragic habit would gain me better press than my real motivation, which was to buy nice jeans. So I told the cops all about my drug problem.

  Lacoste: So you regularly use cannabis?

  LP: Yes.

  Lacoste: And how do you use cannabis?

  LP: Oh, you know, I smoke it.

  Lacoste: Mixed with tobacco?

  LP (snorting): Of course! I’m not a hippie.

  Lacoste: And how long have you been using it for?

  At this point I did some quick maths in my head.

  LP: About . . . a year and a half.

  Lacoste: And how often do you smoke it?

  LP: Oh, you know, maybe three times a day.

  Lacoste: So you’ve used cannabis three times a day for a year and a half?

  LP: Yes, sir. That’s me. Love my weed.

  Lacoste: And how often would you say you sold cannabis?

  LP: Oh, about . . .

  Some part of me, the part that wasn’t eighteen years old and thick as shit, was beginning to suspect I wasn’t doing as well at this as I first thought.

  Lacoste: Would you say you sold cannabis most days?

  LP: Well . . .

  Lacoste (helpfully): To enable you to self-medicate?

  LP: Yes, absolutely. Most days, probably, yes.

  After a bit more of this, they produced the evidence one exhibit at a time, placing each item on the table in a plastic bag and asking me to identify what it was and what it was used for. Yes, that was my bag of cannabis; yes, it was intended for use and/or sale. Yes, those were my scales, with which I measured my cannabis for sale. Yes, this was my money, an amount of which was obtained through the sale of a controlled substance. Then the other bits of evidence were produced.

  Lacoste put an A5 book with a lurid green cover on the table and asked me to read the title.

  ‘How to Grow Marijuana for Fun and Profit.’

  ‘Why do you have this book?’ Lacoste asked.

  This book, along with a well-thumbed copy of On the Road and some girlie mags, had been among my inheritance after we cleaned out Ardian’s room. ‘It was my brother’s,’ I said sadly.

  ‘Have you ever grown marijuana?’

  ‘No. Shit, I can’t even grow tomatoes. Could never get them to sprout.’

  And so on. Once the interview was over, I watched the exhibits go back into the box. At least, I thought, Bondage Fairies isn’t going to make it to court.

  They let me go, pending summons. My dad was waiting for me out the front of the complex. I climbed into the family station wagon and we drove home. He turned on the radio and cranked it up whenever a song he liked came on so he could sing along.

  ‘Aren’t you mad?’ I asked him.

  ‘A little,’ he said kindly. ‘But you’ve been through enough tonight.’

  I smiled in the dark, looking out the window as we turned a corner away from the cop shop. My folks, for all their flaws, were there when I needed them.

  ‘Plus,’ he added cheerf
ully, ‘they didn’t find my stash.’

  I got home and found my mobile ringing in the grass. I had a dozen missed calls from Sarah. I’d been lucky that she hadn’t called while the police were still about. She was upset but not as upset as her mum. I can’t remember what sort of outrageous lies I cooked up to get back in Mrs Lubow’s good books, but she did let me back into her house, and even wrote me a reference for court later on. Bless her heart.

  A few months later, I received my summons to the magistrates court. Because of my admission that I had used cannabis three times a day for a year and a half, and that I had sold it to cover the costs of this desperate need, I’d been charged with multiple counts of use of a controlled substance, and several counts of trafficking a controlled substance. I went to make myself a cup of tea and sat as the world rearranged itself into a wonderful, almost beautiful simplicity thanks to my dearth of options. Whatever happened next, I knew that, like the antagonists of Bondage Fairies, I was certainly, inescapably fucked.

  13

  The consensus among my friends and legal advisers was that I would be going to prison, where, with my schoolboy hips and dramatic cheekbones, I could expect to be repurposed to better suit the organisation, to appropriate the parlance of the HR department. To cheer me up, my friends hosted video nights where we would watch uplifting prison movies: The Shawshank Redemption, Midnight Express, American History X. I started to notice a recurring narrative trope.

  I found myself marinating in permanent low-grade terror, the kind you build up to surgery. As the months passed, I almost became used to it. Since the law had caught up with me, I had finally given in to the realisation that with my 5-foot-nothing physique and floating vegetarianism, I wasn’t a real criminal.

  My parents tried to keep up my spirits, with stories about friends and heroes of theirs who hadn’t minded prison and spent their time inside productively, learning new skills and making connections in the outside world. At the same time, they made me promise that I wasn’t going to push drugs from under their roof any more. They needn’t have bothered. Criminals are scurrilous gossips and the reality of my situation hit my networks faster than it did me. My phone, which had rung incessantly for the past year, fell silent the second I retrieved it from the garden after I’d returned from the cop shop.

  My dealers, once they determined that I hadn’t squealed on them and didn’t need to be murdered, were sympathetic. Get a lawyer, they told me. Someone good. Get a Jew.

  A friend of a friend knew a solicitor at a firm on Lonsdale Street. Their literature promised expertise in drug cases and enough experience to deliver ‘the best possible outcome in the circumstances’. I called him, introduced myself and explained the situation. He listened, then asked a few questions.

  ‘How much did they find you with?’

  I told him.

  ‘What about money?’

  ‘About a grand. But only some of that was dirty —’

  He cut me off. ‘You should be very careful what you say on the phone, Liam. In fact, get off the phone. Come in and see me.’

  He transferred me to a paralegal who booked a time for me to come in, then hung up. I sat in my bedroom holding the phone in my lap, listening to the purr of the dead line. It all seemed very, very real all of a sudden.

  My meeting with the solicitor took fourteen minutes. He scanned through my summons and made an annoyed clicking noise against his teeth. As I sketched out the details, he sat tapping a legal pad with a pencil, occasionally making a note. He looked bored. When I was done he glanced at his watch.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you’re probably looking at some gaol time. It’s a real possibility. It depends on what they end up pinning you with. You made a real mistake in talking. You should never talk to the police without a lawyer there. In fact, never talk to the police at all.’

  He stood up and showed me to the door, talking as we walked. ‘You’re going to have to cease all illegal activity, which I’ll assume you have already. On top of that, you’ll stop taking all drugs and gather pathology to prove that. If you know any respectable people – lawyers, doctors, politicians, that kind of thing – get them to write you a reference.’  We reached the elevator. ‘Come here an hour before your hearing and we’ll proceed to the magistrates court.’ He looked me up and down and frowned at my jeans and raggedy jumper. ‘And wear a suit. If you don’t have a suit, a nice shirt and tie will do.’  Then the doors closed and the elevator plummeted back to street level.

  University started the next week. I’d done poorly at high school but still well enough to score a place studying social work at a university in the city. I had no idea what I was doing there beyond a vague idea that I wanted to ‘help people’. In my mind this would involve guiding people through their drug and alcohol issues, presumably right after I’d sorted out my own. During the day I attended classes and listened to sociologists drone on about the causes of poverty and hardship, and at night I trawled through my address book trying to find someone who could serve as a character referee. A caseworker close to the family wrote me a reference, and a psychologist interviewed me and wrote the court a letter stating that in her professional opinion I was a bit crazy but prison would make me into a sociopath, and so she recommended a diversionary program.

  I found it hard to make friends at university. I didn’t fit in with either of the two broad schools of people studying social work. You had pretty young things from the country and fresh-faced private-school kids who all wanted to work in Ethiopia, and grizzled forty-somethings who had fucked up their lives and were looking to redeem themselves by warning others of their mistakes. I was your standard lefty humanities class warrior, with the chip on my shoulder furrowing ever deeper as I had to listen to sheltered young adults bang on about poverty and pathways to recidivism when I was probably going to prison at the end of semester.

  On the advice of my solicitor, I was getting urine tests every few days to prove that I wasn’t still smoking weed. This involved going to a pathology clinic where I had to give a ‘supervised chain of custody sample’, meaning I had to pee into a specimen jar while a pathology nurse watched in a carefully positioned mirror, like the ones they install in suburban train underpasses to prevent muggings. The supervision was necessary to assure the court that I was producing the sample myself and not tampering with it. The nurse had to keep a line of sight on me the entire time I was peeing so neither of us would break eye contact in that mirror, right up until the moment when I sealed the jar and passed it to them, still warm.

  I usually got one of two nurses. The first was kind and matronly, with a trick where she seemed to look away, appearing professionally distant, even while standing by my side and using a pair of surgical forceps to hold my penis. The other nurse was about my age and the kind of cute, dark, bookish girl I tend to fancy, and who, predictably, I developed a crush on, which was its own kind of hell. Every time I handed over my Medicare card to her on the way out, smiling politely moments after she’d taken receipt of a jar of my warm, drug-addict’s urine, I always felt like a pervert paying to have some horrible kink satisfied.

  I became terribly nervous about the whole thing, and I often had crippling stage fright that prevented me from producing a sample – a problem that, as with most of life’s little hiccups, I realised I could deal with by using drugs and alcohol.

  When my first batch of results came back, I noticed I was only being tested for cannabis. They weren’t checking for any other intoxicant and automatically marked those categories as ‘negative’. The next day I had four beers before I went into the lab, where I produced a sample without a problem. Then, because I didn’t want to go to university drunk, I had a few lines of blow to even myself out. The upshot of it all was that for the first semester of uni, while I was treading water and waiting for a judge to decide which underfunded government pen I would be spending the next few years in, my classmates had to suffer through my turning up merrily impaired, ranting about social stra
ta and indentured servitude and inherited privilege, and only falling silent once the drugs had worn off. It was something of a revelation that I could spend the whole day drunk or high and still pull off a passable impersonation of a citizen. Sure, not a great citizen, but the booze and coke helped to ease the omnipresent terror, and I could relax enough to summon a facade of a personality when I needed to.

  Half a year after my arrest, my day in court arrived. My family took the day off work and school to show solidarity, and made plans to meet me outside the magistrates court an hour before the contest mention. I woke up at dawn, showered, had a breakfast of toast and tea, wondering if this would be my last meal on the outside, and then put on the same charcoal-grey lounge suit I’d worn to my Year 12 formal. I arrived at my solicitor’s office ten minutes before they opened and paced the pavement. I hadn’t worn my school shoes since graduation and they bit into my heels as I stomped about. To distract myself I rocked back and forth, so that the creaky leather pinched my skin harder, and I relished the little burst of pain the way you do when you tongue a loose tooth in a dentist’s waiting room.

  When the doors opened I introduced myself to the receptionist and asked to speak to my solicitor.

  She looked up at me. ‘He’s not in.’

  ‘Oh. Is he already at the court?’

  ‘He’s in Hawaii.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘He’s on leave.’ She tapped at her keyboard. ‘Until . . . next Monday.’

  All the little threads of panic in my mind wove together into one magnificent, suffocating blanket. ‘On leave?’ I managed to choke out. ‘He’s supposed to be representing me in an hour.’

  She sighed. ‘What was your name again?’

  ‘Liam. Liam Pieper.’

  She turned to her computer again, typed something, and then her face fell.

  ‘Shit,’ she said, filling me with hope.