The Ice Age (43 page)

Eventually I left, and caught an early morning train. I thought that everyone on the train was talking about me and staring at me — words people said were references to me, and any look in my direction made me feel as if they knew everything that was bad about me. I had begun to wonder how people knew all this, and I concluded that the Coffee Club incident had been broadcast around Melbourne. It felt if the interior of Melbourne's bright-green and yellow modern trains had served up some kind of proverbial hell where I was being judged and punished for all my sins. When I got to the city, I got off and caught the tram, and again I couldn't look anybody in the eye because I felt so guilty and so ashamed.

I went to the Alfred; I wanted to be in a locked psych ward because I was worried that with this level of public humiliation I would eventually crack and kill myself. At the counter, I saw a nurse who spoke in a stern Irish tone, and the first thing I did was apologise to her. I told her I was sorry to all the women at the hospital for everything that I had done, and that I knew that I was on the news.

‘I'm a mess of different things that don't all go together,' I told her.

I was admitted straightaway. I told the next nurse I saw about how I was worried I was on the news.

‘Oh, honey,' she said with a warm smile. ‘You are not on the news; I'll go and speak to a doctor.' She came back with a small yellow pill, and said, ‘Put this under your tongue until it dissolves, and if you feel like lying down after that you are more than welcome.' After a very short period of time, perhaps less than ten minutes, I felt very, very tired. So I rested in the small white room, with the door open, until it hit me — ‘I've been psychotic' — and I left with my tail between my legs.

So while it was fair to say I was nonplussed by life in general, it was after this incident that I began to form a new conclusion: Crystal meth was just as predictable as everything else in my life.

Thereafter, I tried living ordinary waking life to its fullest in Melbourne. I didn't have any work at that time, but I exercised, I went for walks, I read a lot, I sought to be as kind and open to everyone as possible. One day I went to the cinema, I went out for dinner, I went out to the gym, I read, I walked around Melbourne. It was pleasant, and I felt good, very good, but I was left with two complementary emotions: ‘this still isn't enough, I want more' and ‘that was a nice day; wouldn't it be even nicer to finish it off with some crystal meth?'

Later that day, I met up with an old school friend.

We had used together in the past, and I knew we would use again that night. We got drunk, and eventually I suggested we get some crystal meth — this time, I got a syringe and injected it. I did not go into psychosis, but it was the same old Fantasia, in which we exchanged tales about how good and how underappreciated we were. After that I went back to The Gatwick, the notorious St Kilda hotel I was staying in to research an article, and masturbated for twelve hours — alone, stuck in the same repetitive, amoral sexual fantasies that I would never carry out in real life. It was boring, and I wondered if I could ever get my addiction under control. I went to a St Kilda drug clinic, where I was told it would take four days to see a GP and ten days to see a drug counsellor. Over the next two weeks:

I read Viktor Frankl's
Man's Search for Meaning
.

I read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's
Flow
:
the psychology of optimal experience.

I daydreamed about my trip to Asia.

I started drinking most nights in St Kilda's Fitzroy Street bars.

I came back to the musty, grotty Gatwick one night drunk, and saw a woman injecting crystal meth in her neck. When I asked her why she was injecting it in her neck she said ‘Straight to the brain, brother'.

She huffed and puffed, eyes wild, before introducing me to the woman standing behind her: her daughter, Anna, who repeated her mother's ritual with her own syringe. ‘Are you sure you don't want some love?' she asked, and I answered yes, of course I did.

Anna took me to a room — let's say room number 666 — where I was handed a point of meth for $100, and a clean syringe still in its packet, and I went back to the bathroom and injected the old-fashioned way — on the inside of my elbow.

Over the course of the night, I bought and injected some more with a young homeless man with autism, who spent the entire time we were injecting reciting tracts from what seemed to be a high school science book off the top of his head.

My bank account ran dry.

I forgot my bank account ran dry.

I ordered more meth off a guy I remember as The Bald Man and his dodgy-looking goons.

He followed me to the ATM.

When he realised my bank account was empty, he went ballistic, threatening me, and ripping the chains from my neck, and telling me I could expect to be visited by him later and have my jaw broken.

I retreated to my Gatwick room, where I saw maggots crawling all over the floor and a series of detailed plots began to form in my head. As the morning progressed, I concluded that somebody had broken into my room while I was out and had stolen my laptop to give to a journalist who had hijacked my internet history — my internet porn history, to be precise — and broadcast it on the news.

In no time, it was a bright late-summer morning.

It dawned on me that I couldn't ask my parents for money.

I went to the St Kilda Crisis Centre. While waiting outside, a woman came up to me, with the regular two eyes most humans have, and told me one of her eyes had been stolen.

I believed she was part of the mob who were after me, and that she was telling me my eyes would be cut out. And on it went. I visited my publisher during this time as well, believing that they wanted to cancel the book. I tried to access crisis housing, but was told it was full.

Eventually, I had to return to the Gatwick.

During my sessions with Jay in Bundaberg, she told me many things, and two in particular stuck in my mind while I was at the Gatwick: the first was to think about drug addiction like ‘a stray cat that you don't want to feed; the more you feed it the more it keeps coming back', and the second was that I needed to take responsibility.

By the end of my third relapse, I decided, that yes, I was very much over crystal meth. But there was still the pressing question of what freedom from drugs and freedom from addiction would mean for me, and indeed, what freedom means for me more generally.

In
Being and Nothingness,
Jean Paul Sartre writes: ‘We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are — that is the fact.' While I can admit that Sartre — albeit just my first-year philosophy understanding of him — wasn't on my mind when I was at the Gatwick, freedom, responsibility, and their respective limits were. The Gatwick was a place full of people whose notions of freedom and responsibility are surely limited by both madness and economics. The extent to which Australia's underclass are trapped in their existence occurred to me shortly after my final binge at the Gatwick. Yet many of its inhabitants remained joyous at times; self-pity was kept to a minimum, and people were doing their best to find meaning in the abject and grossly unfair economic conditions that most of them couldn't escape.

I don't quote Sartre's work here to justify a kind of ‘cult of the will' — it is about people's capacity to make their own meaning of their situation. Sartre would in later life become a militiant neo-Marxist who saw economic scarcity as an obvious limit on human freedom — the point being that one cannot be free or authentic when all your energy is expended on finding the next meal or on feeding your family.

The Gatwick taught me first and foremost about the dire state of housing in Australia (there are 34,000 people on the public housing waiting in Victoria alone), and the people there showed me that my experiences of the world didn't justify me seeing things in such a dim way. I wasn't entitled to take drugs because of my suffering. My drug use felt childish and decadent — I was surrendering my obligation to make meaning out of an often-absurd world to a drug that I knew would make me psychotic.

After my third relapse, I decided to stop using for the remainder of my time in Melbourne, and eventually I caught a plane to Malaysia.

I travelled from Kuala Lumpur to Penang to Phuket, and then to a sizzling hot, cat-piss stained communal-living ‘art space' on the fringes of Bangkok city. Curious, short on cash, I shared a room with ten other people that was covered in paintings and graffiti and poetry, and cost just over $4 a night.

I had arrived, in my ignorance, just in time for Bangkok's hot, humid April. It was 37 degrees every day with 80 per cent humidity; the art-space was in a five-storey building in a non-tourist part of town, and it was permanently boiling inside it.

I must have been there no more than a week when I had a fight with a young English guy that started me on a new train of thought:
why am I so angry? Why am I the only person unable to cope with the sweltering conditions?

In the cold — make that obscenely hot and sweaty — light of day, I began to think that I was a very angry man. My anger was making me unhappy, I was having trouble escaping it, and it was making a very nasty, unpleasant person at times. I wondered if it was the after-effects of crystal meth? A part of my personality that grew and grew during months of drug use, and had then become part of who I was? I knew though, that in truth I had been full of rage for a long time.

Prior to this time, I had never read about anger — at least not from a personal perspective. I had always been focused on the things that made me angry, deciding that I would rather be angry than passive, and that there were things worth fighting for and getting angry about.

About an hour's walk away from the art-space was Khao San Road, the tourist area of Bangkok, renowned for its trashiness and its often trashy book stands. Walking past one day, I spotted
Buddha
by one of my favourite authors: the ex-nun Karen Armstrong. I read her biography of the Gautama,
Buddha,
as well as
Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse. The story of the Buddha was so simple, and it started to make a lot of sense to me.

Guatama was born into a rich family, perhaps a royal family. When he first left his family, he saw many people suffering from physical pain, poverty and also from old age. He went to try to discover why so many people suffered. At first he starved himself, inflicted himself with pain, and sought what we might call ‘altered states of consciousness'. This nearly killed him. He decided he needed to find a balance between nihilism and self-indulgence, so he spent many years meditating in the jungle, and discovered what we today call ‘Enlightenment' — an experience that is beyond the power of words to describe.

Buddhism involves a complex number of teachings and ideas, but the starting point resonated with me — namely that the cause of human suffering, or dukkha, is desire, and that the alternative to desire is enlightenment. I wanted to be on the path to enlightenment.

The Wat Phra That Doi Suthep (aka The Golden Temple) sits halfway up a Himalayan mountain directly facing Chiang Mai city in Northern Thailand. It's a half-hour tuk-tuk drive up the Doi Suthep mountain to reach the temple. The mountain landscape changes about every three or four kilometres along the incline: from dry bamboo forest to wet, mossy landscapes to flowers, to mixtures of all three. Until finally you arrive at the temple, with its 20-foot Buddha at the entrance of 230 steps, surrounded by jungle park, with cool misty air that smells of the forest surrounding it, and views over Chiang Mai — the city of one million emerging as just one valley among endless Himalayan rises.

At the temple, I saw a sign for the ‘Vipassana Mindfulness Silent Meditation Centre'. Vipassana means ‘to see things as they really are'. I had tried mindfulness in Australia in a silly psychology clinic about three years earlier and found it completely unhelpful. In fact, I regarded the application of mindfulness in the West as nothing but another fad in the discipline of psychology — which, to date, had been hit-and-mess in providing me with the help I often felt I needed. But there was something about the Golden Temple that made me feel that it was worth trying. I went in to make an inquiry, and was told I needed to make a booking, and that the course was by donation only.

I spent a few more weeks in Chiang Mai, staying in a hostel, abstaining from everything. I found a new level of hunger for the company of others as well as for reading, including some of the ‘difficult novels' and a book called
Wisdom of the Buddha: the unabridged Dhammapada
.

This was all well and good, until I ran out of money again. I emailed the vipassana centre, and they said I could pay just $2 a day if I wanted, but I had to follow a number of ethical precepts as well as the ‘Terms of Abstaining', which included abstaining from stealing, ‘false speech' (actually we weren't allowed to talk at all), singing, dancing, eating after noon, and over-indulging in sleep.

A few days later, I enrolled and was shown the basic meditation technique. I participated in an introductory ceremony in a big hall with the head monk, Sunny. I sat in lotus position in front of him as he sat in his bright orange robes, and, as required, I had to sing a hymn in Thai, then present him with some flowers.