by Liam Pieper
So, here I was, twenty-five years old, and I was surprised to find the little devil who lived on my shoulder, and who would nudge me into action every time I heard a cork pop, was gone.
I’d blamed a lot of people in my life for my inability to stay sober – my folks, my dealers, Sensei, my girlfriends – but I’d been the instigator of just about all of my problems. I’d been waiting for some kind of inciting incident to come along and rearrange my life into something more sustainable, or even just more telegenic. Where was my dramatic low point, the one where I woke up covered in vomit and semen and shame, at the end of my tether, until Whoopi Goldberg came along to show me how to live again? Where was my rock bottom?
Rock bottom sounds like a place to have an adventure holiday, somewhere grittily exciting. The words have a connotation of resilience, of redemption, a firm surface you hit and bounce off of on the way up again. Or even a sandy bedrock a bottom-feeder like me could live off – instead of a pebbled morass of mud and shit and slime in which one could thrash about for a lifetime and do nought else. The fact was, I’d been on the bottom for ages, but I liked it there, so I didn’t try to change it.
As it turns out, the way I did change, the way I stopped being a drug addict, was to, one day, after months of not even thinking about it, stop taking drugs. My time on the mountain had dried me out enough that I’d managed to gain some perspective. While I still craved drugs and booze, my body had rewired so that I didn’t have to take them all the time. I’d never suspected there was a literal moral high ground, but it’s right there in Nagano, three mountains over from Hakuba Village.
Just then, as I was patting myself on the back for being able to have a drink without ending up wetting myself while crying myself to sleep to a Nick Cave record, an old man walked by. As he passed, a breeze blew his kimono away from his neck, revealing a tract of burned, cancerous skin: the same weird, horn-like flesh I’d seen in the museum. I only saw it for a second, before he smoothed his robe back up, smiled politely and hurried on.
That was a moment of clarity right there: this cheerful old man walking past had had a nuclear weapon dropped on him, and I was congratulating myself on not getting blackout drunk in a memorial garden.
‘You know, Leigh,’ I said. ‘It might be time I grew up a bit.’
‘Sound. I didn’t want to be rude but I was going to say that you act a bit of a fanny sometimes.’
I smiled at Leigh, passed him the bottle, shook his hand and walked off. I dropped by the inn to pick up my bag and caught a bullet train back to the Osaka airport. I was going home.
18
It took me a while to make life work again back in Melbourne. I got an apartment on the north side of town, where I had fewer enemies, and a job working on building sites. As the weeks passed and I moved loads of brick and wood around, my shattered health started to improve and muscles started to weave themselves back along my threadbare limbs. I picked up little bits of knowledge, about load-bearing pillars, preventative demolition, retaining walls and cantilevered buildings, all of which, along with a long-forgotten degree, helped me to bluff my way into a job as a technical writer at a giant construction company.
There I realised just how much time I’d wasted pursuing crime, or, at least, pursuing the wrong kind of crime. The thing is, crime is really quite difficult. It’s tense, it’s dangerous, it’s not as lucrative as it should be. And that was when I was a child – I hate to think what it’s like these days, with GPS tracking and phones that listen in on every word. Contrary to what Sensei once told me, crime is a young man’s game, and not a great game at that.
The real money, the true heist, turned out to be working for a multinational making a killing in mining and construction. I’d never even dreamed of money like that before: cash ripped raw right out of the ground with contractors tobogganing gleefully down mountains of the stuff. In a few weeks writing for the giants, I made piles of cash larger and greener than any slinging dope ever got me.
I let the chip on my shoulder about privilege fall away. I didn’t need a private-school leg-up to join the resource boom that powered Australia, to be part of the national hubris. I already knew how to lie, to make one product look like another, to tuck my conscience away like a pencil behind my ear while I worked. And, just like that, I was white collar.
Once I got the cash together I paid back the money I owed all over town, and realised that I had absolutely no idea what to do next. I’d never had any plans that lasted longer than an erection, and I was at a loss as to what one was supposed to do with a lifetime.
Melbourne seemed like a strange city to me now. I walked the streets and found them at once familiar and foreign, as though someone had built a beige replica of the town I’d grown up in. I passed by houses, hotels and shopfronts I’d partied in until I’d passed out, and I felt a twinge when I realised I would never go back there again. My mindset hadn’t changed: I still wanted part of the good old days, and the stealthy caution I’d grown up using to demarcate between society and the way I lived was still there. When I saw worse-for-wear kids spilling out of a club while I drove to work, I felt a wave of nostalgia. If a police cruiser passed me on the street, my hands automatically crept to my pockets, reaching for contraband I no longer carried. Little concussions from my old life kept reaching me in my new one.
For one thing, it dawned on me that the reputation as a scoundrel I’d worked so hard to cultivate wasn’t a great foundation for a life. It complicated things. I needed rehabilitation, in the truest sense of the word. I had to learn how to do everything again. Without coasting through life on a canoe of arrogance over a river of booze, I had no idea how to talk to people. I’d alienated the friends who had stuck by me over the years, and the only ones who wanted to know me now were bad news.
My relationship with my family had decayed to the point where I’d been putting in the bare minimum, and even then it was mostly to preserve the possibility of borrowing money. I’d make cameo appearances that lasted the time it took to drink a coffee, and I’d still be constantly ducking to the bathroom the entire time. Mum and Dad had grown tired of the flighty, evasive way I talked to them, when I’d refuse to answer questions about what was important to me or what I was up to because the answer to both was ‘cocaine’. To anyone who didn’t use, my coke-soaked arrogance was easily mistaken for garden-variety aloofness. I didn’t fancy having to tell my parents that what looked to them like a serviceable life was actually a pretty thin veneer over an insatiable drug problem. For one thing, it would crush them; after Ardian’s death they’d made me promise not to experiment with powders. For another, it might have incriminated Hamish, who, entering his twenties, was enjoying himself immensely, spending nights at clubs in town and daytime recovering with his friends at the family home.
My parents didn’t drink, so they were kind of naive about the effects of alcohol. When Hamish was of an age to enjoy house music and its accoutrements, Mum and Dad didn’t see anything strange in his coming home from a night out on the town and sitting in the backyard to drink beer for three days on end.
‘Honestly, Liam,’ Mum once told me wonderingly, ‘they just drink and drink and drink and listen to techno. They don’t ever seem to get tired. It must be all the sugar in the beer.’
So, for my good and theirs, I stayed away from the family.
The habits that had picked me up as a shy teenager put me down years later the same shy teenager, albeit one with scars and wrinkles and knuckles that ached in the winter. As a child, then throughout an adolescence that stretched well into my twenties, I’d justified my stupid adventures as experiences to be collected like points in a video game. I could get a good story out of this, I would tell myself as I slid into some gutter or somebody’s bed. I would picture myself as an old man, sitting down and taking out his memories, polishing them to show them off, then packing them away again. Now I found myself with a fraught mind, full of booby-trapped souvenirs, rigged with anxiety, so that when I thou
ght of a certain person, I felt a quick shock of shame, and buried it again. I’d lie awake at night, racked with guilt and doubt, old regret permeating the present with anxiety.
All the gloom I’d managed to fend off over the years found me. There was nothing to distract me from the suburban pre-fab destiny. With my first pay cheque, I saw the rest of my life augured in the neat rows of sequestered super and tax withheld; the knowledge of how many days I would spend behind a desk, the exact number of dollars I would make in a year, how much would be bled out by insurance, rent, car loan, house loan, how I would weave a cocoon of debt to grow older and sadder in.
All at once I could see the path that was laid out for me: milestones, rites of passage and the other important events I couldn’t have given a flying fuck about when I was high. I saw them passing by like distance markers on the side of a highway – marriage in five years, work for next forty years, bumpy roads, divorce, estrangement from children, infirmity, the end of the line.
In the depressive wake of a wasted decade, the prospect of an ordinary life seemed terrifying beyond anything I could imagine. Sure, being held at knifepoint wouldn’t be fun, but at least it’d be exciting. Like a hot, dusty pig, I wanted to roll in my old familiar shit. I very nearly went back to it all, and then I met someone who simply wouldn’t stand my nonsense.
I met Michaela at a friend’s book launch. We hit it off and made vague plans to hang out that never eventuated. I next saw her at a writers’ festival, where I was trying to wrangle my one-trick pony into some kind of literary career by telling everyone who would hold still what a dangerous libertine I was. To that end, I was appearing on a panel, and I asked Michaela to come and watch. Halfway through the event I looked out into the crowd and, even though my eyes aren’t great, I saw her sitting there, wearing a distinctive jumper, and got all excited that she’d come to see me. I amped up the charm as far as it would go, tried to be funny but also poignant and wise, and to project an air of world-weary sexiness for her benefit. Every time I got a laugh from the crowd I would glance at her and make meaningful eye contact. What I didn’t know was that Michaela was there with her brother, Tim, who shares Michaela’s tall, lithe build and, on this day, her jumper. After an hour of passionately eye-fucking Tim from across the room, I finished the panel and went looking for Michaela in the crowd, with no luck. I found out later that she’d left after she’d turned to Tim and told him she thought she liked me. ‘Oh, no,’ Tim assured her. ‘He’s gay.’
At a party that night I tried my hardest to convince her otherwise. We made small talk, discovered we had some friends in common and I ended up getting her phone number. I texted her the next day and we made plans to meet in a week’s time when we were back in Melbourne.
The day before our date she texted me to cancel, saying she was too busy writing. Clearly this was a lie – every writer would rather do practically anything other than write – so I figured she’d just blown me off.
I left town for a few days, helping out on a film. I’d been conscripted while drunk at a party, where I’d run into a lawyer friend of mine to whom I owed a favour. He’d mentioned that his little brother, a Dr Who devotee, was shooting a fan-fiction film that he had written, would star in and direct. ‘Actually,’ my lawyer friend said, ‘you would be perfect for the villain,’ and I, full of wine, agreed, then forgot all about it. A few days later I received a Facebook message from the little brother, saying how pleased he was that I’d agreed to play the part.
When I got back to civilisation after the shoot up in a mountainous rainforest area, I undressed, peeled the leeches off my body, showered, and thought I’d try Michaela again. I sent her a text to ask her if she wanted to go to a movie. She said no. I was dismayed, but, more than that, perplexed. I’d never been dumped by someone before they’d got to know me, but that just made me more persistent. Oh, I thought, a wise guy, huh? We texted back and forth, and finally she agreed to see me.
It was the worst date ever. I’d just finished a long construction contract and I was flush with the confidence that comes with the easily won corporate dollar. I thought I could impress her by throwing some money around. I took her to a tequila bar that had an expensive menu and which I assumed would be a fun place to get drunk and get to know each other. I didn’t know, though, that Michaela hated tequila, as well as fun, so things were doomed from the start.
The place was empty when we walked in, and the bar owner brought us menus and hovered anxiously nearby while I tried my hardest to charm my date and got nothing back. Back at the writers’ festival Michaela had been exuberant, articulate, funny and wry. Now she sat in stony silence and glared at me over her quesadilla. She answered monosyllabically and sighed crossly whenever I cracked a joke. Her demeanour was cold, crisp and unimpressed. She was beautiful, yes, but in the same way a glacier is beautiful as it inches down the valley to crush your village.
After an hour of trying to thaw her icy front, I wilted and gave up. She didn’t like me at all. I couldn’t figure out where this unrelenting hostility was coming from, but I would get the answer to that some time later.
Two weeks before, the day after Michaela and I first kissed at the writers’ festival, she had been over at her friend the Artist’s house for an old-fashioned girlie night, eating Japanese delivery, painting each other’s nails and talking about boys.
‘I’ve just met this guy, Liam, and I quite like him, although I suspect he’s a liar. In fact, he just gave a speech at a festival about what a liar he is,’ Michaela said.
At this, the Artist interrupted. ‘It’s not Liam Pieper, is it?’ Michaela nodded, and the Artist went ballistic.
‘No! No, no, no, no. Not Liam Pieper, no!’
Michaela was taken aback. ‘Why, what’s wrong with him?’
‘He’s a sociopath and a drug addict. He’s just a rotten person.’
‘He seems nice.’
‘Do you remember when I was selling coke?’
‘No?’
‘Well, I did, and it’s his fault.’
The Artist continued, driving her case home. ‘He’s such a bad person that I stole his cocaine from him, to teach him a lesson. Liam came around with some coke and when he went to the bathroom I took it, then I sold it. And I didn’t even feel bad about it,’ she finished. ‘That’s how bad a person he is.’
Michaela called a cab, cried all the way home, and didn’t speak to either of us for two weeks. Then, softened by a hilarious text message from me, and the realisation that maybe a cocaine thief was just as bad as a cocaine dealer, she agreed to go out with me on a date to the tequila bar, although she was still wary that I was sitting on ill-gotten piles of drug money, which I would no doubt try to use to get her drunk and cloud her judgement.
On our date I could tell Michaela was judging me poorly, so I tried getting her drunk, buying $30 shots of rare tequilas, which she drank mirthlessly.
‘Yuck.’ She made a face. ‘I hate tequila.’
‘Do you want something else? It’s my treat.’
‘Why?’ Michaela’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.
I shrugged off what I thought was an odd question. ‘Because I like you. Because I can afford it.’
‘How?’
‘I make a lot of money,’ I said grandly. ‘Honestly, you have no idea how much money I make.’
‘How?’
‘I work in construction.’ This was true, but it didn’t sound true, and Michaela glared at me witheringly. I’m slight and quite fey; I wasn’t wearing a beret that night, but you could have easily imagined me wearing a beret. ‘You have no idea how much they pay me.’
‘Are you a drug dealer?’ she demanded to know.
‘No, I was once, but I got arrested and retired,’ I said amiably.
Liar, thought Michaela, and then changed the subject.
After a dinner of tequila and sad, oversalted Mexican, we went to a terrible movie on Lygon Street in Carlton, then, with everything else closed, to Percy’s, a
dive bar across the road, where we drank bad red wine in silence. I tried to kiss her and she pushed me away. ‘Yuck. Don’t kiss me at Percy’s.’
I was defeated. I couldn’t understand what I had done to make her so furious at me. Eventually she got drunk and told me I could take her home if I didn’t tell anyone about it. We went back to my house, where I asked her to wait while I ran upstairs to clean up my room, shoving dirty socks and plates and old mugs of tea under the bed, laying a new sheet over the mattress. Downstairs, Michaela, certain I was packing away a meth lab, thought about leaving but didn’t.
We made out on my bed; Michaela was still hostile but resigned to her fate. ‘Dinner was shit and that movie was worse,’ she complained. ‘The least you can do is have sex with me.’ Not even that, as it turned out. Exhausted, drunk and demoralised, I collapsed, naked and impotent. Michaela sighed and rolled over, silent, then said, ‘Is that a leech?’
It was a leech. The little bloodsucker was crawling up the wall. I must have missed it when cleaning up after the rainforest shoot, and it had clearly been living like a lord in my futon since.
‘I guess I’ll call you a cab,’ I told Michaela.
‘That would be nice.’
The next date wasn’t as bad, and the one after that was okay, and, once I’d cleansed my room of leeches and cured my impotence, Michaela agreed to be my girlfriend. It wasn’t easy, though, because for some reason she was convinced I was a tearaway and a liar. One exchange:
Me: ‘Why won’t you go out with me?’
Her: ‘Because I’m worried you’re a pathological liar.’
