High Season (23 page)

I slipped out of the motel after dark to organise some food and wine for us. Benny had run the local river dry with a half-hour steaming hot shower and then crashed out on the queen-size bed.

As I wandered around the streets of Armidale trying to decide on Chinese or fried chicken, I stopped off at a phone box and—in utter desperation—opened the phonebook and dropped my finger onto a random number. I rang the number and, as I listened to it ring, wondered what I was going to say to whoever answered. My finger had landed on some business called Triple 7 something. And it sounded good. It sounded like a code, like there might be something hidden there, and when the guy at the other end of the line answered, ‘Triple 7, can I help you?' my immediate response was, ‘Yeah.'

And after an extended pause the guy said, ‘Okay, what do you need?'

‘I don't know,' I said.

‘Are you looking for some advertising space? We're an advertising firm.'

‘No. No, I'm not looking for advertising space,' I replied.

There was another long pause, during which he seemed to sense this wasn't just a prank call.

‘I'm not really sure what I can do,' he said.

‘No. Nor am I.' I gently hung up the phone.

It was an intimate call. A weird, softly spoken and utterly random call for help where the caller had no idea what questions to ask and the guy who'd answered had no idea what to say in response. As I placed the receiver back in its cradle, it was hard not to realise how desperate I had become. Pressure will do funny things to a person and everyone is going to deal with things differently, but I was critically aware that I didn't have much sane time left. I was straddling a line, seesawing between madness and something else. And my greatest problem was that I had lost contact with, or even a sense of, what that something else was. I could no longer recall what normal felt like.

I decided on Chinese, a six-pack of beer and a bottle of red, though I didn't even feel like drinking. The powder I'd been shooting up was so riddled with chalk I had to throw away what little I had left. I'd tried burning off whatever they'd cut the pasty skank with by holding a lighter to the bottom of the spoon, but what remained after was no better so I just flushed it. It had been getting harder to breathe the further north we got and I eventually had to acknowledge it was more likely the result of shooting up chalk dust than the side effects of breathing clean country air.

Benny was up when I got back to the motel room. He had the television on and lights going and seemed quite happy propped up among his eight pillows and floral doona.

‘Well, hello, Princess,' I said. ‘How's that great big bloody bed then?'

The sleep had obviously done Benny good because instead of biting back he just laughed and took the piss.

‘'Bout fucking time with the dinner, mate. I was about to phone Pizza Hut.'

‘We wouldn't want you to strain your finger now, mate, would we? What would we do if that happened?'

‘You'd have to pick me nose, for one thing.' He laughed.

‘Yeah, and feed it to you, I suppose.'

‘Nah, mate, I haven't chewed on me snot since I got off the gack,' Benny said.

‘Mate, you'd fucking starve if you stopped eating your snot.'

‘What'd you get?'

‘Chinese and red wine,' I said, holding up the packages. ‘Who the fuck said crime doesn't pay?'

Benny went straight back to sleep after dinner. The combination of food, red wine and a comfortable bed quickly lulled him back to dreamland. Meanwhile, as I sat on my single bed, the television playing soundlessly in the corner, I drew the curtains back and stared out at the old green Corolla. I realised, looking at the car, that it represented a picture of what I had managed to achieve in my twenty-eight years. And it was a picture that, even if you were talented at such things, couldn't be spun into a story where success was even remotely connected to the themes of the narrative.

I'd spoken briefly to Benny about getting up while it was still dark and making a run for Nimbin. It was only about four hours up the road if we didn't plan on implementing the Stop, Revive and Survive plan. After sliding the curtain closed and flicking off the television, I lay in the darkness for a few minutes and resolved that, if I woke up early enough, I'd shake Benny out of his slumber and hit the highway. How bad could it be? We'd get nicked again, probably score a few more tickets, then try to make it all the way to the Promised Land. I was still surprised the police hadn't taken us down to the station or impounded the car or done something that had relieved us, or at least me, of the burden of having to make further decisions.

Ten o'clock in the morning in Armidale is reasonably busy. It's not Pitt Street but there's plenty happening, including the motel's maid banging on our door and insisting—in the nicest possible broken English—that it was time to arise from our beds and face the day. And what was good about that was that we hit the ground running. Benny headed straight for another pounding hot shower while I placated the maid and told her we'd be out in fifteen minutes.

The car didn't look quite so vulnerable in the morning. Somehow the colour and movement of a busy weekday allowed the faintly ridiculous nature of the Corolla's bulging outline to blend more into the background. I jammed the rest of our shit into the car and strolled down to reception and paid the bill. Once again, the old couple were completely charming; they didn't make a big deal about payment or being late or using half the town's water supply; they just accepted payment graciously, not asking too many questions in the process, and bade us well on our journey. Their graceful hospitality has become something I recall in moments when I'm working in a hotel or a restaurant and a customer strolls in who is obviously not a natural fit with the surroundings. If they're looking for kindness and hospitality, then I try not to make a big fuss and give them what they've come for. And more generally, whether it's in the family home, at a social function or in the context of work, hospitality addresses the human body and its universal needs for food, drink and shelter. That's what we do in hospitality; we don't so much address people as bodies. It doesn't and absolutely shouldn't matter if you're black, white or brindle, rich, middle class or down on your luck—everyone has to meet those basic needs of food, drink and shelter in order to survive. Sometimes I think we get things a little screwed up with grading systems, restaurant scores or numbers of stars, rather than acknowledging our roles as either host or guest with a spirit of hospitableness.

As Benny and I waved our goodbyes to Ma and Pa Hospitality at reception, I turned the smoking four-cylinder beast towards the train station. I'd convinced Benny we should load our collective shit onto a train and then catch a bus to Nimbin. We'd be able to collect our treasured possessions at a later date from the Lismore railway station. It all sounded fair enough to Benny, whose spirits had picked up remarkably as a result of a long night of uninterrupted slumber.

‘You're a cheery soul this morning,' I said to him.

‘Yeah, not too bad,' he replied.

‘Nearly there now,' I said.

‘Yeah,' replied Benny, with a faraway look in his eyes. ‘Not far now.'

28

Benny and I caught the bus up from Lismore to Nimbin and headed straight to Grandma's Farm, a small home-stay on the fringes of town. After lugging our now more modest collection of possessions into a communal sleeping area, we caught up with a few locals I'd come to know over the preceding years and then got smashed on the local weed.

Nimbin marijuana is famous the world over for being a particularly smooth, strong bush weed. If you weren't a complete blow-in, the locals would look after you. There was no police station in Nimbin back then, the hotel still operated as a hotel rather than the backpackers' hostel it has become, and there were no tourist buses flooding the streets each day with fresh loads of young people from around the world, all doing the east coast of Australia. I'm not saying it was better or worse, just that it was different. It was quiet. Life was very slow. You might get twenty people in the Rainbow Cafe playing acoustic guitar and smoking some weed, but it just seemed like the thing everyone did rather than being something which drew a crowd of onlookers.

After a few days in town getting over the epic road trip that had delivered Benny and me to Nimbin, I hooked up with a very obliging girl who owned a Holden station wagon and we decided, on a stoner's whim, to head into Byron Bay for a night of debauched pleasure.

On a personal level, I wasn't travelling well. Since getting to Nimbin I'd been completely shit-faced on weed and booze and it wasn't long before any plans Benny and I might have had about getting our act together seemed as distant as ever. Plus, I was still hanging out from the smack, which by now had become such a regular physical sensation that I wasn't sure how I'd feel if I ever got completely free of opiates. Hanging out simply became a balancing act that I mediated each day to the best of my ability with whatever resources were at hand.

I don't remember much of what happened that night in Byron Bay. I know I got completely smashed and woke up in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar house in the main street at about five am. That was early for me, but I hated waking up somewhere completely strange so, after raiding the fridge, I set out for Nimbin.

Nimbin is about fifty kilometres from Byron Bay and I knew it wouldn't be easy getting one lift straight there, but I thought I'd be able to hitch-hike maybe three or four lifts and be home by breakfast. Five hours after setting out, however, walking all the while, I ended up just west of Bangalow and saw the signs for a drug rehab. I know some people might say, ‘What are the chances of that happening?' And I can only say, not great. But that's what happened. And even more importantly, I walked into the joint and asked some questions.

What surprised me most about the person at the rehab clinic was how much they seemed to genuinely care about what I was going to do next. They asked me a whole series of questions and basically got my drug history down over the next hour. Then they laid out a plan for me: the first step required going to see someone for a referral to a detox unit, the second going to that detox for a week, after which I could hang out in rehab for anything up to six months.

It sounded like a good plan to me. Autumn was morphing into winter and I was riddled with lice from sleeping rough in Nimbin. I was also hungry most of the time because I couldn't get my shit together sufficiently to cook anything, and every time I did I just felt like more of a loser given what had happened to my glittering dreams of a career as a chef. A few months in rehab looked like a five-star option. Log fires were burning in the four separate rehab houses as well as the community hall, and because they only took up to twenty-four people at a time there seemed to be a lot of space for people to wander about and get themselves sorted. Obviously I still had absolutely no idea what a person did in rehab or detox, or what was required of someone once admitted, but it looked like a better deal than the one I had going on.

When I finally got back to Nimbin and told Benny what my plans were, he was a little put out. Though he agreed it would be the best thing for me to do, it meant his life was about to become considerably more difficult. He would have to work out for himself what to do next and where to go. And I'm sorry to say things didn't go too well for Benny. Not long after I checked into Nimbin Hospital and spent a week detoxing, he made his way up to Queensland where, a year or so later, he crossed over that line between madness and whatever sanity is, and when he did he couldn't find his way back. He developed a crushing case of schizophrenia and things continued to deteriorate for him until eventually he found his way to a rehab which, like the one I went to, was a ‘total abstinence' model. After they took him off his schizophrenia medication he went and jumped off a bridge.

For me, though, that time in Nimbin became a turning point as I finally got straight and managed to claw back something of a life. The total-abstinence model isn't for everyone, though. It didn't suit Benny, and in fact probably helped bring about his demise. There's no easy, one-size-fits-all cure for drug addiction or mental illness. Really, we know very little about the mind and its inner workings, though specialists in these fields have made huge advances in treating mental illness and addiction pharmacologically, and to turn away from those advances to pursue some abstinence, moral-fortitude model rarely works.

Interestingly, the word ‘hospitality' derives from the same word as ‘hospital'. The Latin
hospes
, or host, is also the root word for hotel and hostel. And what was interesting about that as I lay in a hospital bed in Nimbin was that it was difficult not to be aware of how similar hospitals and hotels are in the way they both deal with the human body. They both provide beds, food, drink and a sense of being looked after.