Loaded (17 page)

Lyrics run in my head.
You can't look back
, you can never look back. I stare at my reflection on the blank screen, I pick up the remote from the floor and turn onto a music video. A long-haired, scarred-skin young boy is screaming into a microphone. No sound. Kylie Minogue is singing in the lounge room. I leave the volume off, sink back into the pillow and do my own screaming. Not one sound comes out of my mouth.

The smell of the sea tickles my nose. Through the half-open window of the room I am in I can hear echoes of the waves hitting the shoreline of St Kilda Beach. The beach which for decades has been the home of junkies and whores, refugees and migrants, now being redone, remodelled, restructured into a playground for the sophisticated professional. Under the piers, in toilets, in the back of discos, St Kilda offered me in my youth a smorgasbord of illicit pleasures. Cheap drugs, free sex. Getting drunk, getting stoned, getting high.

The sea breeze tickles my nose. Along the coastline of the city, the beaches open up to the chasm which is the end of the world. Below us there is ice. Nothing else. No human life, no villages, no towns, no cities. Many nights I would take the tram and head down the beach, walk along the sand and sit on the end of the pier looking out to the darkness of the bay and dream of what I could find if I dived into the waves and swam away. Looking out to the horizon, I would dream of new places, new faces, new lives possible to live at the other side of the world. Never thoughts
of ice, instead I thought of the North, the places my mother and father talked to me about. The arid soil and hot weather of the Mediterranean.

The Greeks, sons of sailors, daughters of fishwives. Rarely rich enough to live next to the sea, the Greeks live one suburb away. Never close enough to the bay to receive the strong sea gales straight into the lungs; just close enough to allow the breeze to tickle the nose.

To the South are the wogs who have been shunted out of their communities. Artists and junkies and faggots and whores, the sons and daughters no longer talked about, no longer admitted into the arms of family. In the South, in the flats and apartments smelling of mildew and mice, are all the wog rejects from the North, the East, the West. Flushed out towards the sea. When you look straight across the ocean you look into the face of your dreams.

The whore dominates the imagination of the Greek, of the Turk, of the Arab. The insults my father threw at me when I first challenged his authority were words meant for a woman.
Poutana, skula
. Whore, dog. His one English obscenity. Cunt. Those insults have formed me, they have nourished me. In latrines and underneath piers I have enjoyed pleasures that are made sweeter by the contempt I know they bestow on me in the eyes of the respectable world I abhor. And the danger I face in pursuing my pleasures is the guarantee I have that I am not forsaking my masculinity. The constraints placed on me by my family can only be destroyed by a debasement that allows me to run along dark paths and silent alleyways forbidden to most of my clan and my peers. To be free, for me as a Greek, is to be a whore. To resist the path of marriage and convention, of tradition and obedience, I must make myself an object of derision and contempt. Only then am I able to move outside the suffocating obligations of family and loyalty.

That I am a whore, a dog, a cunt, is no one's business. To confess my life, or even to proclaim it proudly, entraps me
in an interaction with the wogs which would draw me back within the suffocating circle. My silence and my secrets allow me to move freely around the landscape of my city. A public life is a privilege only available to the rich, to the famous.

The sea breeze of the southern ocean, the breeze that comes up from the end of the world, makes me strong, draws me to the whores and faggots and junkies. I am a sailor and a whore. I will be till the end of the world.

I'm coming down. I can't lift my head off the pillow and I try to light a cigarette. A lifetime passes in reaching for the cigarette. A lifetime passes in bringing it to my mouth. A lifetime passes in lighting it. I inhale the smoke to stop my teeth from grinding on each other. On the television monitor I watch flickering images: a woman in a miniskirt, a man in leather, a beachscape, the bombing of Baghdad, a burial in Sarajevo, mushroom clouds, desert, a couple kissing, guns, the Virgin Mary, the red crescent, the hammer and sickle, silence = death, the US flag, tits, bums, crotch shots, guns, another mushroom cloud. Young black guys pointing fat fingers towards me, white guys spitting at my face; women licking their lips shoving their arses towards me. I forget the cigarette in my hand and it burns my finger. I let it fall on the bed, watch the sheet begin to burn and struggle to lift my head, exercise my dry mouth to produce some saliva and spit a gob onto the burning hole. I lift myself off the bed and stumble across the room, falling onto a chair.

Slowly, step by fucking step, concentrating on my feet, I walk out and into a dim hallway. Dawn light is visible. Janet Jackson is on the stereo in the lounge room. I search for the bathroom and find it, a small room lit by fluorescent light. In the mirror I look at my skin, at the dark blotches
forming around my still too-wide eyes. My hair is standing on end. I close the door and wash myself thoroughly, take off my T-shirt and wash away the thin, white residue of George's sperm on my body; wash away my sweat, his sweat, my come, his come. Wash away all traces of smell on my body.

I wash myself so hard till my body is red raw. I take out my cock and scrub it, wash out the dried come forming under the foreskin, wash away the traces of his saliva on my cockhead. When I am done, I wipe my body with a dirty towel hanging over the shower rail and comb my hair back into shape. I walk out the bathroom and walk into the lounge room. Three people are sitting in a circle smoking bongs. I take a couple of pipes but I am silent. They in turn do not ask me questions. They offer their smoke out of drug etiquette. After all, I have partied till dawn.

After my third pipe I get up on unsteady legs and wave goodbye. They don't lift their heads. I search my pockets for my cigarettes and I can't find them. I go back into the bedroom and search there, find them on the bedside table and I decide to open the drawer to have a look. Some condoms, a pocketbook, some tapes and a Walkman. A Sony Walkman in good condition. I take it out and cradle it under my arm. I take a hurried look through the tapes. Nothing I like except an old Beastie Boys cassette. I pocket it. I light a cigarette and walk through the house and out the door. No one looks at me while I'm leaving; no one notices the Walkman under my arm. The sun has risen and the street is glowing in warm summer colours. I sniff hard and I can almost taste the sea, somewhere behind all the flats, all the concrete.

I stand outside till my cigarette is finished and then put one foot ahead of the other. I hook the earphones on and press the play button on the Walkman. A beautiful clear sound. An expensive piece of machinery, but the tape inside is shit-awful, polished contemporary soul lacking any heart
and any spirit. Some white man trying to pretend to be black or some black guy completely castrated by the dictates of the music business and the pop charts. I take off the tape and throw it in a bush. I take out the Beastie Boys cassette from my back pocket and put it in. A deafening crash of drums and guitar enters my eardrums and I'm no longer coming down. I turn up the volume and walk towards home.

Mum and Dad are going to kill me. I'm not thinking about George, I'm not thinking about the party, I'm not thinking about the weather, I'm not thinking about sleep. The Walkman is screaming at me that I have to fight for my right to party and all I can think of is that Mum and Dad are going to kill me. I increase the pace of my walking and walk down Chapel Street towards home. I pass Italian boys in white shirts setting up seats outside their cafes and cross High Street and watch old Greek couples head off to church or maybe to the market. People get out of my way.

The Beastie Boys are singing about hard cocks and girls with ever-ready pussy. Slowly, slowly, thoughts of Mum and Dad recede. Glimpses of George in my mind. His cock, half-erect, the hair covering his chest, the roll of flesh around his stomach. The speed and the acid and the eckie and the grog and the dope are still running around my system. I cross Commercial Road, cross Toorak Road and take the path down to the river. A group of private school boys in singlets and shorts are going rowing. All golden hair, muscles and tanned skin. I ignore them and head for the nearest toilet, under the bridge. I piss, a long piss, into the metal urinal and when I'm finished I wait there, standing with my cock hanging out. I still have the Walkman on, but I've turned down the volume.

A tall guy with shaved hair, wearing a black T-shirt and leather pants, enters the toilet and stands at the urinal next to me. He doesn't take a piss. I would prefer to get off with a wog but I'm horny and I want some sex to forget George (to forget his pale skin) and this guy will have to do. He takes out his cock and starts masturbating. I start pulling myself. He puts his hand on my cock and tugs hard. I can hear him mouth something but I keep the Walkman on.
He removes the left earphone and whispers if I want to come home with him. I refuse and put the earphone back. Metal rap comes out of the headphones. He keeps tugging at himself and at me. It is taking ages for me to come. A sound behind us makes us stop and we stand apart.

Some old Yugoslav guy with a big gut and grey hair is stroking his crotch. I turn around to him and show him my cock. He takes his out and I go over and we start wanking. The man in the leather pants comes over as well but I ignore him now. The old man has a huge thick cock that he has trouble getting up. The foreskin is pulled tight around the cockhead. He starts kissing me and I resist, draw away from him, but I let him touch me all over, let his fingers go up my arsehole. He smells of cheap aftershave. Metal rap is pounding in my ears. I want him to come all over me, in my mouth, to wipe away all traces of George. But he doesn't try to get me to suck him off. Instead, the shaved-head guy gets on his knees and is sucking us both, taking turns.

I put my hands inside the old man's shirt and rub his chest; thick and heavy tits, fat hairy gut. He tries to kiss me again and I move away and wank myself, close to coming. I ejaculate all over the faggot on his knees, come falling on his cheeks, his lips, on his torso. The Yugoslav guy reaches for me, trying to get me to jerk him. I'm no longer interested. I push away his hand and walk out of the toilet into the green park. I'm dripping come into my underwear. I can no longer smell George on me. I smell of cheap aftershave.

Mum and Dad are going to kill me. Mum and Dad are going to kill me. Mum and Dad are going to kill me.