Leviathan (46 page)

On a winter's night some ten years ago I sat on the step in front of the old Woolworths store at Kings Cross. I huddled deep inside a borrowed army jacket as the rain came down in a cold, oily film, working its way through three layers of clothing. It had been that way all year, a taxi driver told me. All the squats were filling up and flooding out, and it was cold enough some nights to snap-freeze the occasional wino. My step outside Woolworths was in the middle of things and not a bad place for sitting around, checking shit out. A bit frantic sometimes. I watched a girl get speared through a window once. She lurched around with her head flapping open, blood gushing everywhere. (‘I'm all right, I'm all right, just fucking leave me alone!') But at least I was out of the rain, and I could doze off occasionally without having to worry too much about getting rolled. I was working. I'd had this crazed idea to shame Bob Hawke for not following through on his promise that by 1990 no child would live in poverty. His spin doctors were going to work on the problem as the date approached, recasting his ill-considered promise into a claim no child
need
live in poverty. Or something like that.

I didn't live in Sydney at that point. I was still moving from couch to couch in Brisbane, pulling down about three or four hundred dollars a year working for student magazines. So homelessness and poverty were issues I felt qualified to comment on when I pitched the idea to
Rolling Stone
of my living on the street for a couple of weeks, sleeping in parks and eating McRefuse from dumpsters until I'd worked my way deep inside the story.
Stone
's editor lent me the army jacket and pointed me up William Street where I soon became part of the furniture. My twitchy, angry loner routine, lack of personal hygiene and round-the-clock presence quickly marked me out as someone special even within the incredibly weird matrix of King Cross neighbourhood dynamics. Before long it seemed everybody was trying to score drugs from me, except the drunks, who just wanted to share their battered paper cups of cheap port and backwash with a brother who was so obviously down on his luck.

Two or three nights into my first week on the step at Woolworths I was chewing joylessly on a toasted chicken sandwich, working on my thousand-yard stare. It was early, but a few drunken fist fights had already flared up and died at the train station. I planned to wander over there later, for a drink and a smoke with a dreadlocked hobo named Graham, an ex-Navy man who'd done all his dough on some ruinous investment scam before taking a long hard slide into the gutter. The warm air which rushed up from the station was a godsend to us outdoor types, and when Graham wasn't suffering from some sort of psychotic episode he was quite good company. He asked once what I was doing on the streets and I told him, truthfully, that I was a writer. He looked at me for a second before saying, ‘Yeah, I'm outta work meself at the moment too.'

This time of night, even with the rain and the cold, the footpath was thronged with hookers and buskers, some Japanese tourists, bikers, freaks, businessmen, one or two sailors and wandering packs of losers from the burbs. It was still quiet though, with none of that speedy, kind of trippy sensation that comes down later on. A couple of stolen-watch dealers and a lightning-sketch expert set up nearby. Next to them was a thin family man with wet hair and a fat blonde wife. She nursed an infant and shivered on a wet hessian sack while he murdered Dylan on a three-string guitar. They had no shoes and he made just three dollars, one for each string. They had another child who came over once. But she was crying so much the man yelled at her and she took off again.

I finished my sandwich and shifted around, trying to work some warm blood into my cold, numb backside. I decided what I really needed was some new cardboard because the old box I was sitting on was wet and starting to disintegrate. But to go looking for more would mean losing my A-list seat, so I stayed put in the pulpy mess and before long a girl staggered over. She was young, maybe thirteen or so, and soaked through to the skin. Violent chills swept over her every few seconds. Her torn grey miniskirt and pink Minnie Mouse top were no protection against the weather. One dirty white slipper flapped off in the wet crap on the pavement and I moved over as she slid down beside me, holding her head and whimpering. Her legs were chubby and turning blue from the cold. I wondered how long she'd sit there invading my personal space. I wondered what her trouble was, and then he came rolling over. An unhappy pimp. He looked a bit older. About fifteen, maybe seventeen, I figured, but in much better shape. He wore a new pair of boots with acid-wash jeans and a good leather jacket. He crouched down and punched her, a blow which would have sent her head back into the glass door with a crack had she not seen it coming and flinched into a tight defensive ball.

‘I'm getting jack of this, Helen!' he hissed. ‘This is the third time this week. You're really giving me the shits, you know.'

He hit her again. He was only half my size and I suppose I could have given him something to go on with, but what was the use of it? Helen would be back every night until she died. And anyway, I told myself, who needs the attention? I stared past them to the road as a minibus full of public servants and drunken bank clerks inched through the traffic crush. Someone had tied balloons inside the vehicle and out. Confetti and streamers swirled around in the back and every now and then a beer can flew out. I asked myself whether their disgusting yet candid voyeurism was any worse than my paid subterfuge. A young woman in a Tarago hurled a bottle of wine cooler from the window, laughing as it smashed on the ground. I muttered, ‘Bitch,' but it meant nothing to either of us and then my focus came back in a rush as the pimp yelled again.

‘Come on, Helen!' he shouted, digging his fingers into her arms and shaking her so hard I thought her head might jiggle right off. ‘You can't keep doing this, can you?'
Slap!
‘You gotta go back to work, dontcha?'
Shake!
‘You can't fuckin sit 'ere all night feelin' sorry for y'self, can you?'
Slap!
‘You can't go home. You gotta get out an' earn a dollar, eh? Gotta go back to work? Eh?'
Slap!
‘Ah come on, wake up! I gotta get back to work too you know.'
Smack!

But the girl could only go with the blows, lifting her head an inch or so to ask for another shot of heroin before a backhander whipped in and cut her off.

‘Look, you can't have another! You've already had one tonight. You have another one an' you'll die wontcha, hey? You know that.'

‘
Wannanutha
,' she blubbered as the boy ground his teeth. He stood up and walked a few metres away before turning with his hands on his hips. It looked like he was lining up to punt kick her out of the world. I shivered and leaned away from the girl as the wind picked up. The stolen-watch dealers asked him to move out of their way.

‘Look, are you goin' back?' he asked the girl softly, doing a slow burn. ‘You can't have another hit and you have to go back to work.'

Helen bunched her fists in the shock of greasy brown hair which hid her face and whimpered. He waded in and hit her twice, hard enough this time to send her head into the glass with a couple of thuds.

‘You're not getting another fuckin shot, Helen!' he yelled. ‘That's all there is to it. Now straighten out and get back to work or we're gonna have a fight. You don't wanna have another fight now, do you, Helen?'

No. Helen just wanted another shot. I thought then that he might smash her clear through the window. But instead he knelt down to search in his bag until he came up with a packet of cashews.

‘Here,' he said softly. ‘These are your favourites, eh? Cashews?' He moved the hair out of her face and pushed some nuts between her lips. ‘Eat up, Helen. They're good for you. You like nuts, doncha, mate?'

But the nuts wouldn't stay in. They fell from her slack lips, unheeded as she moaned for a shot. The young pimp kept trying to push them back in but she shook her head slowly and rocked from side to side. Finally she pushed her chin down onto her chest and he muttered, ‘Shit,' and threw the packet away. ‘Look,' he sighed heavily. ‘You're buggering up me schedule, Helen. I gotta go see a bloke up the Wall in a minute and I still gotta do Michelle round the corner. So you gonna go to work or what?'

‘
Wannanutha …
'

He tapped her lightly with the back of a finger to drag her attention back to him. ‘Listen,' he said, ‘if you go to work now and come up the Wall in an hour or so, we'll see about getting you another shot, eh? How's that sound?'

It must have sounded okay because she looked up at him for the first time. Then she slowly gathered together whatever it takes for thirteen-year-old junkies to push themselves off the tiles and back onto the footpath to ask strange men to fuck them for money.

I never saw her again, but that's not unusual. Faces come and go all the time up the Cross. After I had lived in Darlinghurst for a couple of years I realised there were some stayers, perennial hookers and doormen and local crims who never seemed to leave or change or even breathe in some cases. But they were all old hands who had cut some sort of Faustian deal to survive on the edge of the abyss. The younger faces almost never lasted. They just disappeared or grew so old so fast it was like watching a special effects movie. In that way heroin was almost occult in its power, a magic dust which could suck the life right out of your face. This was ten years back of course – a long time before the Wood Royal Commission, before the 5T or heroin chic – and Sydney did not dominate the national heroin market as it does now. In those days interstate syndicates tended to run their own shows, importing, wholesaling and distributing independently, whereas now Sydney's control of the trade is nearly absolute. Even Melbourne's massive appetite for China white is largely fed by hundreds of kilos of Number 4 arriving in shipping containers at Darling Harbour every year.

Helen was very much a bottom feeder in this food chain and most likely her nattily dressed pimp was not that far above her. She was just a user. He was probably a user-dealer and above him were another three or four levels of ounce dealers, brokers, wholesalers and importers. The ounce dealers were visible, still having to get down and dirty in the marketplace, but the more rarefied levels were, and remain, virtually invisible. At that point, in the late 1980s, the cops would have fingered the Chinese and the Lebs as the most likely candidates to head up the biggest and best organised import networks, but beyond that speculative leap it all became a little pear-shaped and confusing, with distribution from the warehouse via hundreds of networks of local players, mostly Anglos, some of whom, it turned out, carried badges and guns. While a lot of disorganised criminal activity saw weights of up to one or two kilos come in strapped to the body of courier ‘mules', or simply sent through the mail to a series of post office boxes, the really heavy hitters might never even lay eyes on the stuff they imported in job lots of ten, twenty or thirty kilos. They would arrange the finance and logistics of a payload, most likely from Burma, through Thailand and into Sydney via shipping containers or air freight. That purchase through a broker in Hong Kong or Bangkok at twelve to fifteen grand per kilo would then arrive to be broken down into one or two kilo packets for distribution to any number of wholesalers, all buying in at up to a quarter of a million dollars a kilo. The wholesalers would step on the product for the first time, diluting it with glucose, icing sugar, caffeine, chalk, soap powder or even plaster of Paris for sale in five and ten gram lots to their ounce dealers at two or three hundred dollars a gram. The ounce dealers, most often profit takers rather than users, would dilute their buy again before dealing to one or two dozen regulars, at which point the likes of Helen's pimp became involved.

While the machinations of the drug industry's royal families remain mysterious, the activities of the soldiers and serfs are not. The fix which Helen's pimp had allowed her earlier in the evening had probably come from a five gram score, either bought in a dealer's car while on the move or paid for and retrieved from a nearby stash. When I lived near the Cross a coffee shop owner in Roslyn Gardens grew so tired of junkies and user-dealers plucking their purchases from where they had been pinned to the tree outside his cafe that he took to rushing out with a baseball bat and threatening violence every time he noticed someone moving towards the spot. The original importers and wholesalers of the batch from which Helen scored would have been almost one hundred per cent certain of never being detected or arrested. Those hassles were a hazard which she, her pimp and his supplier were much more likely to face, although the risk could have been minimised by a judicious alliance with whichever syndicate was at that point running the local drug and sex rackets with the active connivance of the local police.

Also unlikely to face arrest and prosecution were the thousands of casual users living in the inner city, the joy-riders who held down normal jobs and might score once a month or a fortnight or a week, depending on their level of income and addiction. These were the ones who really surprised me when I first arrived in the city; lawyers, journalists and advertising execs with a nagging habit worth maybe a hundred or two hundred dollars a week. They could maintain a facade of detachment from the low-rent, scabbed-over aesthetics of the street-level smack trade, but every now and then one of them would take a hot shot from a batch that maybe hadn't been stepped on as often as usual and then a couple of dozen of their numb, bewildered friends and relatives would make the long trip out to the crematorium to pay their respects and wonder what the fuck went wrong.

What went wrong in Kings Cross was exhaustively and painfully documented by Commissioner James Wood who tried to hunt down and slay what Queensland academic Dan O'Neill used to call the Beast. O'Neill was referring to the tropical mutation of that same strange confluence of feral capital, the State and the underworld which was a motivating force behind the violence of the green ban backlash. Wood was less directly concerned with the debauching of civil society than his colleague Tony Fitzgerald had been, but the evil possibilities of any partnership between ‘legal and illegal violence' informed his investigation, as it had the Royal Commissions of Justices Costigan, Stewart, Williams and Moffitt before him. Moffitt directly compared the subversion of the State by organised crime to attacks by fascist or communist enemies, writing in 1985 that the corruption of public institutions was so advanced that ‘we are dangerously close to … ruination'.