The Big Whatever (23 page)

I dug that for a long time. On the face of it, it sounded okay. But you've got to get hep to the Ching – there's always a twist, usually a nasty one. Its message this time seemed clear enough: Mel was the wanderer – things would come good somehow. But I wasn't buying that. I sat there, tuning into my feelings, getting deep into it. Strange sensations way down in my stomach. Images in my head. They didn't
go away. More I thought, the heavier they got. Fire on the mountain. And a cold wind blowing on my skin. I knew this one. It meant the nearness of enemies.
The
enemy. Barry was out there. Looking for me.

Then I dug the meaning:
Barry
was the Wanderer, who roams around, around, around, around. With his two fists of iron. Whose perseverance would bring him good fortune. Now with the full protection of the Victorian police.

Barry who had driven my comrades into the path of the oncoming oil tanker at Violet Town. Maybe he'd just been trying to force them off the road. Maybe he hadn't meant to kill them all. Or maybe he'd
started
out trying to run them off the road, but his mind changed halfway through, and when the opportunity for mass murder arose, he couldn't resist the urge.

I picked up the bundle of notes from the bed, flipped through it. Not a fortune but still a goodly whack. Checked out the heroin again. The brick was perceptibly smaller now, one entire corner chipped off. But still heavy. Evil and heavy.

I stared at the rest of my stuff, imagined the random sequence was a message, a sentence. Or a hexagram. I kept staring until I got it, until I knew what was to be done. What I'd always known, but had pushed aside, pushed down, too chickenshit to face it.

I woke with a start. It took me a few long moments to place myself.

It was daylight. I was in the Matraville shack, lying on top of the stretcher bed, fully clothed. The book was on the floor next to me. My back felt sore when I got up. I walked outside to lose the stiffness. The sun was well up, the sky was blue, a sea breeze was blowing. I washed, ate a slice of toast, then picked the book up and skimmed through what I'd read last night. I went back outside and lit a smoke. After three puffs I chucked the butt away, thought, I'll have to knock these ciggies on the head.

* * *

The moment I say “no blue,” Fred and Donny exhale slowly and lean back in their seats. Donny says, “It's the right thing, Bill.” Fred says nothing, just nods. The three of us leave the espresso bar and go back upstairs. Over the next hour matters are duly stitched up. Abe will compensate Joe Dimitrios. It's a hefty whack by my standards, and will be added to what I already owe Abe.

The Combine will charge no interest on the principal they reckon I owe them, but while it remains unpaid, I have to do work for them. Odd jobs. They put me in touch with one of their people, known as ‘the Professor,' a Hungarian migrant with a fleet of cabs. I'm to get one of his cars at a special mates' rate. I can push it around town to my heart's content, do my own rorts on the side, but have to keep myself available for Combine tasks, for Abe, Joe, Phil, whoever.

The House of Cards will be no more. A month after the carve-up Abe rings me. “The poofs are looking for a venue,” he says, and within a week he reopens the place under the name Harlequin's, featuring an all-new drag revue.

In 1970 Max Perkal becomes famous, twice. First as the weird-looking beatnik organ player in a film clip that gets played on
GTK
, then as an armed robber. The book has those robberies happening in May, during the first Vietnam Moratorium march, but in fact it all happens in September at the second march, which was nearly as big as the first.

Otherwise the account is true enough, according to the bits and pieces I hear later. The car full of bank robbers hits the oil tanker on the Hume Highway the day after the Moratorium, and that's it. Everyone dies, including the tanker driver. No one can quite work out how it happened – on a straight stretch of road, in broad daylight. Police ask any witnesses to come forward. There's a hint that some third party's bad driving might have forced the robbers' car into the path of the oncoming tanker, but that line of enquiry never gets any further, and there's no
mention of any yellow Charger.

Something is scraped up from the wreckage of the incinerated car and brought back to Sydney, and the muso fraternity give Max an old-fashioned New Orleans–style jazz funeral. People in Sydney are shocked to discover Max had become an armed robber.

Meanwhile I've become a taxi driver. I don't hate it, not at first anyway. You drive around until someone sticks their arm out. You stop, they hop in, you take them where they're going, they give you a dollar or two, then they're gone. On a good night it can be exhilarating. But it's no way of earning a living. So I keep my eyes open.

Around Christmas 1970, a bloke called Terry, who I play pool with sometimes at the Forth and Clyde, lets on he has a friend living in the hills back of Byron Bay who has grown a few dope plants. They're ready to go. Just need to go and get them. I've got nothing better to do so we take a drive up to Byron.

Terry's mate turns out to be the surf legend Anthony “Mullet” Jackson. He won a big comp in Hawaii a few years before, started a board manufacturing business, did his back in, lost the business, now writes for surf mags. He lives in a nice farmhouse with his wife Katie.

Mullet is a lair and a risk-taker from way back, noted for hijinks both in the surf and on dry land, and a pioneer LSD user. He's a black-haired, perpetually grinning, fast-moving bloke. Katie keeps her own counsel and, I can't help but think, keeps him more or less half sane. I like them both well enough.

When Terry said Mullet had grown “a few plants,” it was an understatement. It's a serious commercial crop. Back then people were still selling dope by the matchbox, but there's enough leaf here for us to go large. So we start selling the stuff by the ounce, packaged in sandwich bags. After that, I'll never see a matchbox deal in Sydney again.

We do a second run, and that sells just as fast. Terry has his friends, I have mine, and that's enough to constitute a market.

Having a neighbourly smoke with the buyers is part of the
business. Till one time I find the dope hits me a bit harder than previously. I go home jumpy, can't sleep. Sudden sounds set my heart racing. I get up, lie back down, start stewing on my problems, going over the same shit in my head, again and again.

It gets worse. I start wondering where I stand with things, with people. The word “paranoid” is just coming into use, and I figure that's what I am. It's not pleasant. I try not to smoke so much.

The feeling of being watched stays with me, and I can't tell if it's real or imagined. I start spending more and more time in my old hideaway out by the Chinese market gardens near La Perouse. For no good reason except I feel more comfortable there, because no one knows about it. I fish off the rocks down at Cape Banks sometimes, just me and the La Perouse blackfellas, who keep to themselves even more than I do. We get on just fine.

Next summer Mullet has another dope crop ready for market. Bigger this time. Plus he has a couple of friends up there who now have crops of their own. Terry and I drive north to collect, come back and sell out in quick time.

Early in 1972 I get a call from Fred Slaney. He wants to talk, says it's important. We meet at Bar Reggio in East Sydney.

“Your name has come up,” he says.

I don't say anything, wait for him to go on.

“Drug Squad.” He waits for my response. I make none.

He goes on. “Something hush-hush they're up to, in league with the Federal boys.”

“What do they want with me?” I say.

“They're looking at that surfie feller, Jackson.”

I nod. Wait again.

He looks at me, realises I'm not going to offer anything more.

“Who I hear has become a mate of yours,” he says. “There are hippies everywhere up the North Coast now, did you know that? On the dole. All of them growing pot. Not just a plant or
two out by the chook shed, either. Large scale, some of them. Drug squad was told to get involved. They've got helicopters and everything.”

“Is Mullet in line for a pinch?”

“His name's been mentioned. And yours with it. Someone's gobbing off. Nothing planned, far as I know. But they're watching.”

I nod, take a sip of my espresso.

“The Federal blokes do things their own way. If they decide to go for you, they'll prepare a thorough case. If they can't catch you redhanded, they'll look elsewhere. At your bank accounts, for example.”

“Yeah?”

“If there's dough there you can't explain, they'll use that as part of their case – it's circumstantial evidence, but juries fucking hate anyone with secret funds. And if that doesn't work, they'll get the tax department to go for you. Who are worse.”

So far my share of the proceeds has gone in payments to the Combine, or as support to Eloise and the kids. Plus I've reinvested in the next crop. But I have a modest nest egg – not enough to pay off the gangsters, but too much to lose – sitting in a bank account under a bodgey name. The others I guess would have considerably bigger bank accounts than mine.

Terry and I drive up to Mullet's for a council of war. Anna comes along, and I bring the young bloke for a bit of a holiday. We spend a few days relaxing chez Mullet. Neither Mullet nor Terry is too fussed about the police attention – it's old news up there. There have been cops everywhere for the past year.

But Terry is naturally cautious, and takes the warning seriously. We've covered our tracks well enough as far as the growing and distro goes, but we need to clean our money, he says. Legitimate investment is the way to go, he reckons.

It so happens that Mullet is a more than fair photographer. He's good at capturing those glassy, backlit waves, and his photos help sell his magazine articles. Recently, he's graduated to film, and now he proposes we slide a few dollars into a surfing movie. Always popular, he says, and surfies will back up again
and again for their favourite films. With even just so-so luck we'll probably at least get our investment back – as bright, shiny, newly – and legally – earned money. And who knows, we could get lucky. Terry and Anna figure they've nothing much to lose. I'm indifferent, but even the slim chance of a big payday down the track is enough to tip the balance.

So
Surfie Walkabout
gets made. Big waves, small waves. Famous breaks, unknown breaks. Trippy rock music when there's no surf. A little judicious female toplessness. And there's something new in Mullet's film, too –a thinly veiled dope subplot. Drugs are not mentioned explicitly, and never shown outright, but references to “greenery,” “vegies of the gods,” “heaven's smoko,” and so on in the dialogue speak directly to surfer-heads. The smart move is, the film doesn't bother trying to show what it's like to be stoned. But you get the idea that the lads on the walkabout are doing sly business everywhere they go, and that leads to comic situations.

Surfie Walkabout
pulls a good house when it opens at the Rose Bay Wintergarden, on a bill with
Reefer Madness
and some old Marx Brothers film. It draws well at university theatres, too, though the Hoyts mob who control most of the country's screens aren't interested.

Audiences like it when they see it, but not enough audiences get to see it, even though Mullet does a lap or two of the entire country, showing it in local theatres, scout halls and surf clubs. In late 1972 Mullet, still hopeful of a breakthrough, takes the film overseas, and that uses up most of our grass profits for that year.

At some later point – I can't for the life of me remember when exactly, most likely early in '71, a few months after Max's death – Barry Geddins makes my acquaintance.

I'm at a barbecue at Tommy's place in Collaroy. Tommy was part of the team on the Alexandria electronics job back in 1968, a driver like me. I'm in the back yard, fishing a beer can out of the Esky, when a lanky, strangely ill-proportioned young man strides over and says, “The famous Mr Billy Glasheen!” His right
hand is out, waiting for me to shake. His arms look too long for his body. He's very tall, but he stoops a little, like he's about to fall. Thick short hair. Strange eyes – unfocused, and his gaze suggests he's looking at something off to my left. His clothes are a bit odd, too: a blue sweatshirt, too bright orange jeans.

He says, “My name's Barry, and it's a real pleasure to meet you. I've heard of you, of course. We've just been up the coast. Bloody tremendous part of the world there. You can swim, fish, shoot. I've been to England and Europe and in my opinion they're shitholes. Some people like those places, I know, but right here is the grouse. I've been all over.”

He's still holding out his hand, waiting for me to shake it. I find it hard to resist common courtesy, but my reaction to this bloke is strong, and I start to turn away.

“This is Karen,” he says, trying to save the moment. He draws to him a blond girl who'd been hovering behind him, late twenties, suntanned, straight hair. She's smiling. My first impression: good-looking, good-natured, not bright. She puts out her hand and we shake. Then Barry shakes my hand before I can retract it.