We
were sitting at the tram stop in Richmond waiting for the tram to
head back into the city to Southern Cross Station. I sat on the end
of the bench on the corner of Church and Victoria streets and Neysha
sat in the middle, to my right. To her right again there sat an old
man, probably around sixty-five or seventy years old, dressed as most
old men usually dress and waiting for the tram like we were. Neysha
and I talked for a while about Richmond and why I love living in this
suburb – to paraphrase my housemate Brodie, “it's that 3121 real
shit” – there's a real grittiness about Richmond and I told her I
enjoyed that. While we were talking, as if on cue, a local smackhead
approached the bench. I've seen this girl before, wandering aimlessly
around Victoria street in the middle of the day, stumbling, glazed
eyes, riding the tram with a lost look on her face. She's one of many
sad characters that populate the streets in this shitty inner-city
suburb of Melbourne, and I'd always had my suspicions.
She
approached from the right – from the other side of Church St –
and looked first at me, but must have assumed that the girl I was
with, being as she was roughly the same age as me, was my girlfriend.
Her eyes then fixed on the old man, and she stopped herself just in
front of him and squatted on the footpath in a submissive, prostrate
position before looking up at him and engaging in conversation. Her
voice was thin and high-pitched, and she was clearly drifting in and
out of lucid consciousness, never fully in control of herself, but
she grabbed the reins for long enough to look into his eyes and ask,
“you looking for a good time?” As she said it she made a motion
with her right hand to imitate the way she would suck his tired,
sixty-five-year-old dick to a climax for some pithy sum of money that
I didn't quite manage to overhear. I was paying as much attention as
I could at this point while still trying not to be too obvious... it
was hard to maintain an air of normality and Neysha and I had stopped
talking as soon as the afternoon's twisted courtship had commenced. I
wanted desperately to hear what he was saying, but I couldn't grasp
much of anything. Maybe he said something to her that I didn't hear,
or maybe he didn't even reply to her, but whatever his voice did or
didn't tell her, I could understand everything from his uncomfortable
body language... he tacitly refused her subsequent urges and offers
to give him her phone number. “Do you want to call me later?” She
asked. “I just need some money for food and a packet of smokes.”
She was getting a little more forceful, sensing, surely, that there
was no relief to be had here.
All
this time I said nothing, and Neysha said nothing, and we both
allowed what was definitely the saddest, most enthralling spectacle
we were likely to see for quite a while, to play out. The woman with
the thin voice stood up after about thirty seconds, having obtained
neither business nor money from her client, and walked away in the
direction that she had come. Once she was out of earshot I resumed
talking to Neysha and told her about how I'd seen this woman before.
I saw her with a bunch of other broken, drug types across the road
from Woolies a month or so ago; one of the guys she was with was
trying to sell a gold necklace to some fresh looking Asian kid with a
hoodie and trackies. He was talking with quick, dirty slang about how
he'd stolen the necklace off of some guy he'd bashed the night
before, and was using words like 'bruz', which made my
skin crawl. It reminded me of the way some of my friends back
in Adelaide talk, and it scared me to think that people I know are
constantly only three bad decisions away from staring this life in
the face too. They had left the hooded Asian with the promise to be
back in half an hour – they were “going off to hit the hammer”
(inject heroin). I told Neysha this other story to go with what we
had just seen, but I left out the part about it reminding me of
people I knew because I didn't want to start down that depressing
conversational path, only having met this person five or six hours
ago.
Both
times I've seen glimpses of the course underside of Victoria Street,
3121, I have laughed to myself. I don't really know why, I don't know
what about seeing a drug addict solicit prostitution or overhearing
another try to sell stolen jewellery is funny – actually I don't
think anything about it is funny, not at its core. At the very base
of it, it's fucking sad. It's terrible, but it's also surprising –
not that it exists at all, but that it exists right there, right in
front of me. It's kind of scary, but also kind of exhilarating too,
although the naivete required to believe that makes me want to
rethink myself a little... nevertheless though, the sheer shock of
the whole situation is where the laughter comes from. When the heroin
lady walked away from us after failing to pick up her lonely,
uncomfortable target, Neysha and I both laughed to eachother with
raised eyebrows and twisted faces. We weren't laughing out of
amusement, we were just shocked... so fucking shocked... we knew what
we'd seen, and as much as we were laughing, we both knew that neither
of us was making a joke.
“When
the heroin lady walked away...” that's how I started that
sentence. That's how I described her. “The heroin lady.” That's
all she is to me, that is her only distinguishing
characteristic. Not her face, not her eyes, not her hair or her voice
or her clothes or her views on China. Heroin... that's who she is,
and that's what she does. Jesus Christ... where do I even begin?
Peace,
Taco.
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