by Liam Pieper
Me: ‘I’m not a pathological liar. They can’t help lying, which isn’t me at all. Do you know what a sociopath is?’
Her: ‘What?’
Me: ‘Nothing. Let’s go steady.’
One night, some months later at a dinner party, the group was discussing how the Artist, who by now had achieved a decent level of fame and fortune, was going. I boasted that we were friends.
‘Friends?’ they said. ‘After she stole your coke?’
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, genuinely bewildered. Across the table, Michaela flinched and changed the subject. Later that night she described what had happened all those months ago, the other side of the events that sent me fleeing to Japan, only now narrated through the prism of the Artist’s perfectly self-serving world view.
After I’d heard the story from Michaela, about how the Artist had stolen my drugs so she could sell them on, I told her about the aftermath, how I’d accused Doctor Paul of robbing me, then robbed him, then fled the country, before coming back to spend months working to pay back my debts. I was cross about the money, of course, but what really boiled my potato was the Artist’s long diatribes to Michaela about how she shouldn’t trust me, that she would be willing to trade her friend’s potential happiness to avoid making reparations for her theft.
Michaela confronted the Artist and asked her to admit to what she’d done. She just said: ‘Jesus.’ Michaela explained that she thought it was unfair that the Artist had robbed me, that there had been consequences, and she asked her to make amends. ‘It’s fine if you think he’s a bad guy, but your actions would have affected other people. If you steal that much money from someone, it’s going to have a ripple effect and hurt other people.’
‘It’s not my pond,’ the Artist shrugged.
‘It may not be your pond, but you still chucked a brick in it.’
The Artist shrugged again. ‘Not my pond.’
Michaela started crying, came home, and cried all night. In the morning, she told me about the conversation.
‘Pond!’ I was flabbergasted. ‘The cheek!’
‘Agreed. What are you going to do?’
I didn’t know what to do. Once upon a time I would have worked myself into a bluster and gone around to the Artist’s house to rage and pout and get my money back, but that was a long time ago, in another life.
‘It’s not my pond either,’ I decided.
I paid an awkward visit to Doctor Paul, apologised, and gave him back the money I’d stolen from him during my righteous psychosis. He was very good about it, said he understood and had let it go, which I was glad of. I even felt, for a second there, as the doctor shrugged and shook my hand, a strange thing it took me a while to recognise: gratitude, that stealthy fucker, had found its way into my heart. Looking back, I was struck that so many people over the years had given me the benefit of the doubt, and, while it was silly of them, I could now appreciate what it took for them to take a chance on me and to forgive me my sins, endless, recursive and vile. Most of all I was grateful for the unconditional love of my friends and family, a force undaunted by time, pure and transcendent, and surpassed only by that other kind of love, the one with blow jobs.
I’d forgotten what it was like to be in a relationship based on mutual trust. What a simple joy it was to have a confidante, someone I didn’t have to lie to. I mean, I lied to Michaela plenty, but it was nice to be able to take a break sometimes, and not have to keep a running spreadsheet of my misdemeanours and felonies and whatever horseshit I’d used to cover them up. I was in a happy relationship, but that happiness was supported by another intangibility: that somehow, improbably, life was good.
Even after everything, I had found my way back in. Perhaps, like my grandma always said, no matter how far gone I was, I had my guardians, my armies of angels and cherubim, standing over me, invisible and indefatigable, rubbing together their ethereal defibrillators, ever ready to start up my cold dead heart anew.
19
I can’t point to a particular stage in my life when things got better for me. Little by little, in the tiniest increments you could imagine, I learned how to suffer minor slings and arrows without emptying my house of drugs and booze and getting caught breaking into the neighbours’ house in search of a bottle of Tia Maria to send me off to sleep.
Between new friendships reminding me that people aren’t born scheming and cretinous, getting sober, falling in love, and the slow drift of time, the various bruises to my heart and ego started to heal. It’s not a new story, but it was a new discovery for me: how life works. You build your happiness like a bowerbird, using shiny, stolen moments to weave your peace of mind.
I had sobriety, work, a relationship. Things, in short, were good. I took up gardening as a hobby. Instead of spending my weekend swerving drunkenly across roads or trying to cauterise a knife wound with a bottle of rum and a Zippo, I pottered around my courtyard, composting and re-potting basil. I began to tune in to the seasons and rhythms of the world around me in a way I hadn’t before, and wouldn’t have been able to when I was floundering. Instead of dreading the cold snap that meant winter was coming and the hours I would have to spend camped out in the rain waiting on dealers, I saw an opportunity to plant garlic and beetroot. When my garden got infested, I read up on organic pest control, laying out treats to coax birds in to clear out the snails, planting marigolds and dandelions to attract ladybugs that swarmed over the aphids eating my garlic shoots, all while I stood back and laughed like a vengeful god. A vengeful, very camp god.
As part of my new life I tried to make amends to those I’d neglected and lied to along the way. I kept paying back the money I’d stolen here and there, and made apologies to the few people who would still pick up a call from me. I felt guilty about having distanced myself from my family for so long and vowed that I would do anything for them, except see them. When I did, it was under sufferance, and I was insufferable.
The problem with getting clean was that, along with sobriety, I found sanctimony. I had the born-again’s zeal against sinful things, and took umbrage at the fact that my family all still really loved weed, a situation that hadn’t been helped by the advent of YouTube.
In the early days of my recovery, I would use any opportunity to lord it over my family. Just like old alcoholics never really lose their mottled gin-blossom complexion, I’d absorbed some of that cocaine hubris into my being, and rarely missed a chance to turn the perfect arc-light of my sobriety onto their flaws.
‘Do I want a joint, Mother?’ I would sniff, adjusting my monocle. ‘No, I’m rather too old for that, don’t you think?’
Or, when my dad would congratulate me on landing a story in some obscure literary journal, I would hold this out as evidence that I was a superior life form. ‘Well, all my success in writing, Father,’ I would announce, ‘is because I stopped smoking that weed. And now look at me! I’m famous on the internet!’
My behaviour was grandiose and aloof, but it was only part snobbery and rebellion against my bohemian family. It was also self-preservation. The thing is, my sobriety was and is tenuous. I still crave drugs, and have to batter down the devils when I find myself around them. Whenever I watch one of those low-rent blue-filter movies from the nineties in which some ingénue tries cocaine at the beginning and is sucking heroin out of her pimp’s cock in the next reel, part of me thinks, Oh, that looks nice. I still drink, and although I try to keep to the glass of red wine the doctor recommends, my body doesn’t want a glass of wine. When I have a sip, my brain sends out orders to my body to drink the rest of that bottle, and then its friends.
When I would visit my childhood home and swing open the door to the cloyingly sweet scent of weed, it would start a disquieting craving somewhere inside me. It’s not that I even liked weed, but the smell kicked off the cascade of thoughts at the back of my brain that made me wonder if I wouldn’t be happier shooting goofballs somewhere in Latin America, an idea that, even now, takes considerable will to t
amp down.
I developed a kind of familial holding pattern, visiting long enough to check in, but without developing any real connection to or interest in their lives. They’d long ago stopped asking questions about what I was doing or whether I was seeing anyone, and if they did question me, I dodged it out of habit. They seemed content just to know that I was still breathing, and I felt much the same way. We existed a bit like allied medieval townships built within signal-fire distance: each behind our walls, but happy that the other was still there, where we could theoretically come to each other’s aid.
I didn’t like visiting the home where I’d spent so many unhappy years. Spending time there brought back more bad memories than good, and it upset me to watch my little brother continuing the behaviour that I’d only recently given up myself. I couldn’t help myself from growing judgemental, then angry, then sad when I popped in for a visit and found everyone propped up against ottoman stools, baked and watching Seth Rogen films. That really got to me. I raged inside my head at my parents: Seth Rogen isn’t funny! How can you find this entertaining? You are wasting your lives. It shouldn’t be me giving you this lecture! But I didn’t speak up. I swallowed my frustration, made polite small talk and left.
Even though I’m a second-generation hippie, far away from my Catholic forebears, the Church runs in my veins. Long after the Catholicism has left a family, the traits run on; the tides of shame and judgement, the secrets they necessitate, they stay in the blood. Deep in each of us, the value of discretion, the clandestine church-pew whisper, the moral cowardice afforded by the Serenity Prayer. Lord give me the excuse to accept that things cannot change. Rather than make my whole stupid story a bildungsroman in which I head out into the wilderness, find my sobriety and bring it back home espousing the miracles of green tea like Prometheus with his flame, I just slunk away. I was sober, yes, but it made me the black sheep of the family. I went my way and they went theirs.
Then, just when I’d started to feel that they could live one way and I another, Hamish ended up in hospital.
I’d refined my visits into efficient ramraids. I would storm in, say hello, collect my mail, sit down for a cup of coffee, and maybe help myself to cuttings from the herb garden. One afternoon I’d swung past and was sitting at the kitchen table flicking through envelopes while my parents played with the cat. I asked where Hamish was and Mum and Dad exchanged a look. It was the look that children give each other when they’ve broken a vase and are thinking how they might glue it back together before they are busted. Finally, Dad spoke.
‘We can’t tell you.’
‘Why not?’
‘He asked us not to.’
‘No?’ I smirked. ‘Is that so? Is he in witness protection? Has he been a deep-cover operative all these years? Is that why we all keep getting arrested?’
‘He’s in hospital.’
The grin dropped off my face. ‘Huh?’
‘He had a bit of an episode. He’s in the Monash psych ward.’
‘Oh . . . When did this happen?’
They did the look again.
‘About a month ago.’
‘A month ago!’ I was dumfounded. ‘And you didn’t think that I might want to know this?’
‘We planned to tell you when you visited. But you never come around.’
They had me there.
The psychological ward at Monash Medical Centre is down a long glass-and-steel corridor that runs off from the main entrance. To enter, you have to walk through a circuitous series of chambers where you pass anxious-looking visitors on their way in, or hollow-eyed visitors on their way out. At the end of the corridor you have to ring a buzzer, announce yourself at an intercom and enter through a heavy steel security door. I told the box who I was, then waited a few minutes before I was buzzed through.
The guy who met me at the door had a few days’ worth of stubble and a gauge stretching one earlobe. His sneakers squeaked on the floor and gave a slight bounce to his gait as he came to greet me.
‘Orright, mate? You must be Hamish’s brother.’ He had an English accent, and everything about his manner seemed designed to put you at ease. There was something of the dog whisperer about him – his body language, his handshake, all combined to present a calming front. I relaxed. He announced a visitor for Hamish and chatted as he signed me in.
‘He’s a good kid, your brother,’ he said. ‘Smart as a whip.’
Hamish met me at reception and gave me a tour of the facility. He showed me his room, which was 3 metres square with two single beds divided by a curtain. His roommate was lying in the dark and rolled over to face us when the light turned on. He was a big guy, heavily muscled and heavily tranquillised.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m Liam.’
‘Hey!’ he said, and then went to sleep.
We left and closed the door. ‘He seems nice,’ I said.
Hamish nodded. ‘He’s really fun.’
‘What’s he in for?’
‘Oh,’ Hamish said mildly, ‘he keeps stabbing people.’
We walked into the rec room, which had a beat-up stereo and a pool table. We played a game while he told me what had happened. It was a lengthy game, not because the story was particularly long, but because I’m shit at pool, and Hamish was medicated. We missed shot after shot, passing the cue back and forth. Every so often a friend of Hamish’s would come in and say hi, and Hamish would tell me their prognosis once they left. ‘This is Damien.’ I shook Damien’s hand. It was sticky. As he shuffled off, Hamish whispered, ‘He thinks he’s an angel of God – Gabriel, I think? But that’s not why he’s in here. He keeps trying to have sex with his mother.’
In between these social calls, a piece at a time, I got the story from Hamish.
He’d been doing a placement at a public school in a rough part of town as part of his education degree and was having a hard time with the class. The supervisor had been bullying him, and when he complained to the principal in charge of the program it got worse. So he did what our family always did in a crisis. Just like other folk might crack a beer while they sit on the couch and mull over a thorny problem, there’s an old Pieper tradition of getting a little high while you try to look at an issue from all the angles. Which is fine, until you combine it with the other Pieper tradition of never letting go of a good buzz.
To deal with the stress Hamish had been smoking too many bongs and far too much meth. He lived at home, but Mum and Dad were on holiday at the time, and I, busy chasing the dollar, wasn’t around to keep an eye on him as his mind started to slip. Eventually, he hit a tipping point, and, after a long bender in which he’d taken heaps of meth, coke, mushrooms and Stilnox, he was driving around aimlessly huffing nitrous oxide bulbs when he decided to die.
When he told me this I thought of a phone call he’d made to me a little over a month ago, when I’d been driving home from work, tired and cranky. He’d been high and manic, and asked my advice about suing his university.
‘On what grounds?’ I’d asked.
‘Psychological distress,’ he’d said. ‘A friend of mine is being bullied and is having suicidal thoughts.’ Suicide, I thought. That old friend.
‘It’s harder than you think suing a university. They tend to know good lawyers, on account of they make them at home. I would tell your friend to get a grip and grow the fuck up some,’ I replied.
If I’d been paying enough attention to realise that Hamish’s ‘friend’ was in fact him, I might have been more sensitive.
To end it, he took a handful of uppers, then a handful of downers, and then drank a bottle of vodka. It was lucky that he’d started with uppers, as the amphetamines coursing through his system stopped him from passing out before he’d vomited the downers back up.
He wasn’t well though. It had been days since he’d slept, and he was having an acute psychotic episode. He was convinced he was going to die and wanted to do it at university, where they could see what they’d driven him to. He drove to the uni and tried t
o go to class, but they wouldn’t let him in. Someone called his girlfriend, and she found him passed out on a couch in the student lounge. She took one look at him and drove him to hospital.
I put down the pool cue and stared unhappily at the wall, where a whiteboard was strung up. Someone had scrawled a Bob Marley lyric across the board. I stared at it vacantly, and realised after a moment that they’d got the lyric wrong, and had written ‘None but ourselves can set you free’. Fucking hippies, I thought, can’t get anything right, not even hippie stuff.
I was angry. At Hamish for taking the same cowardly way out of problems as I had my whole life; at my parents, for the example they’d set us. I was mainly angry at myself, though. Where the fuck was I when this was happening? Why wasn’t I told? Why hadn’t anyone called me? I’d let myself drift away from my family to the point where my little brother could end up in hospital and nobody thought to mention it to me. I was gloomy on the drive back to my parents’ house, where I sat down with them to talk about what was going to happen next.
Hamish would be released in the coming weeks and would live with my folks. While we were discussing logistics, Dad got up to roll a joint.
‘Dad!’ I shrieked.
‘What?’
‘You’re smoking pot?’
‘Do you want one?’
I got into a flap. ‘You can’t keep drugs in the house. Your son is getting out of rehab. It’s not fair to keep weed here. Anything could be a trigger for him. You can’t let him be near drugs at all. At all.’ Dad listened and nodded, in such a way that I knew meant he was going to keep stashing drugs in the house. ‘You’re not listening, are you?’ I demanded.
‘We’ll keep them locked up,’ Dad said mildly. I stared at him while I raged inside my head. Why don’t you get it? Why do I have to explain this to you? Time and again I’d urged them to quit smoking pot, but it had never happened. It wasn’t that they didn’t try to quit. Sometimes, maybe twice a year, they would try to go cold turkey, which always made for a grim couple of days in the house. Dad could never sleep without it, and after a few days of sleep deprivation would start to fray, before losing his shit completely. Mum would overcompensate by starting to chain smoke hand-rolled cigarettes and grumpily announcing how long she’d gone without getting high. It was normally only a couple of days, and when she cracked she would keep smoking the thirty-odd cigarettes a day, but first she’d pack them full of reefer.
