Loaded (18 page)

I pass a greasy coffee shop and someone yells my name. I look into a window and Serena, her blonde hair falling across her tired eyes, is waving at me. She brings a coffee to her
lips and beckons me inside. At the counter a heavy Lebanese man is reading a newspaper, looks up for a moment, then averts his eyes. The smell of burning fat and the mild odour of tobacco coats the air in the shop. I order a coffee, and pull a soft-drink from the fridge; my lips are dry, cracking. I run my tongue over them.

–Where's Maria? I ask. Serena says she doesn't give a fuck and offers me a cigarette. I take it and sit on a chair opposite. My body sags into the plastic, and I stare across at her. The drugs are still a poison in my system. I notice her eyes are red. I light the cigarette and try to think of something to say. But she begins the conversation.

–We had a fight. I don't answer and she continues.

–We had a fight and I asked to be dropped off here, told her I was going to wait for the first train and then go home. She cradles her coffee cup. Except the first train has gone and I'm still here.

–What did you argue about? I'm too strung out to talk to her. Too much has already happened tonight, I'm too tired. I don't want conversation, I want a joint, or a Valium. The Lebanese guy brings me my coffee and I hungrily gulp up the sour stinging fluid. Serena doesn't answer my question. Instead she asks me a question.

–What happened to the guy you picked up? I shrug my shoulders and look out the window. People are going to church, the Easybeats are on the radio. He left without me, I answer and I feel a tear is stinging in my pupil, bursting to come loose. I don't let it. Serena doesn't pursue it. She begins to answer my question.

–I was drunk, I guess. I asked her to sleep with me. She begins to laugh. And of course she said no and of course I got embarrassed and of course I got fucked off. She begins a quiet sob. I'm a dickhead, I'm a dickhead, she mutters and I look away again, out to the world beyond the coffee-shop window. Her story continues, and she begins to tell me about her love for the other woman, tells me that she has
been seeking a wog to love, someone who will understand her, for a long, long time. Tells me she's tired of Aussie dykes, dykes who can't converse, can't express emotion, can't be affectionate. At twenty-one, she already sounds so exhausted. Nearly twenty, I sound exhausted. I am exhausted. The story she weaves comes in and out of my ears and I listen to the sound of her voice, listen to bad songs from the sixties on the radio.

–Do your parents know? She's asking me a question.

–Know what?

–That you are gay? Am I? I want to say. I want to tell her that words such as faggot, wog, poofter, gay, Greek, Australian, Croat are just excuses. Just stories, they mean shit. Words don't stop the boredom. Instead I shake my head. No, I tell her, they don't know. She laughs and takes my hand. Her fingernails are long, thin, painted scarlet.

–We have to protect them, Ari, she tells me.

–What do you mean, protect. I don't understand her.

–Protect them, she is insistent. So that the neighbours don't talk, so the relatives don't talk. She is loud now. You are protecting them, Ari, you don't tell them about your life because you know what that will do to them.

–Like I care. Her face freezes over, she draws back into her seat. She wanted a connection between us and there isn't one. She cares. I don't. I'm protecting myself. Mum and Dad are adults. They can protect themselves.

–You don't give much away, do you, Ari? She takes her hand away from mine. I move mine under the table and clasp at my knees. The woman before me is drunk, angry. I'm afraid she's going to make a scene. Instead she starts sobbing again. I scratch my face, try to say something, nothing comes out. She's drunk, I'm drug-fucked. None of this connection between us is real, it is all hallucinations. I find some words. You're beautiful, I tell her, and she is. Her pale soft skin and her dark eyes. She smiles at me and thanks me.

–I have to go, and she rises from her seat. Tell your friend
Maria I'm finished with Greek girls. I'm going to stick to my own kind.

–Where do you live? I ask her. Sunshine, she answers, I'm a dyke from the West. It's a long way away, isn't it? I ask. For me it's just another suburb in this city of suburbs.

–Sure is. She asks me where I live. I point to the view outside. Here, I live here.

–I hate the suburbs. Serena hands me a five-dollar bill and I decline. She pushes it firmly in my hand. I pocket it and wipe her hair from her eyes. Get out of Sunshine, I tell her.

–Got to. And you, Ari. She kisses me on the cheek. Where the fuck do you go? Somewhere, I answer, somewhere with no wogs, no faggots, no skips. She laughs and the tears coating her pupils vanish.

–I'll see you there, she tells me. I shrug. Maybe. Life's a trip, isn't it, Ari. They are her final words to me. She walks out the door and doesn't look back, walks up Swan Street towards the station. Back to the suburbs.

There is this urban myth I once heard. It may be true. That the places where the wealthy reside in my city were built in the East because it meant when driving home the rich would not get the sun in their eyes. The squinting and the sunstroke fall to the poor scum in the western suburbs.

There is another urban myth. It is about solidarity. The myth goes something like this; we may be poor, may be treated like scum, but we stick together, we are a community. The arrival of the ethnics put paid to that myth in Australia. In the working-class suburbs of the West where communal solidarity is meant to flourish, the skip sticks with the skip, the wog with the wog, the gook with the gook and the abo with the abo. Solidarity, like love, is a crock of shit. The rich
don't fear the unionised worker, they don't fear the militant. They fear the crim, the murderer, the basher. Crime doesn't pay but it is the only form of rebellion open to us. And to survive the thief must eschew solidarity.

Us, them. I am neither. I don't belong to the West. The West of chemical-vomit skies. This is an industrial city, a metropolis of manufacturing plants and workshops for blue-collar labour. The noise of the factory was the soundtrack to our childhood. All vanishing. The factories are being pulled down, the skies are emptying of smoke, and the flat, dry ground of this city is now home to thousands and thousands of petite boxes where people who used to be workers live.

Community. Don't comprehend that word. The mania of our culture is the desire to accumulate and accumulate, to become richer, to become classier, to become more secure, wealthier. It is impossible to feel camaraderie if the dominant wish is to get enough money, enough possessions to rise above the community you are in. To become richer and wealthier than the people around you is to spit in their faces. And the wogs, being peasants, do it best. Possession of land, of more and more land, is the means by which an uneducated, diasporic community enables itself to rise in the New World and kick their brothers and sisters in the face, in the gut, in the balls, in the cunt. Beyond all else the peasant requires land to feel secure. But unlike the accumulation of consumer products or of money, there is a limit to the availability of land. This is why wogs turn on each other. They have migrated to escape the chaos of history and they know, they know fundamentally, property is war.

The West at night, as you drive over the Westgate Bridge, is a shimmering valley of lights. In the day, under the harsh glare of the sun, the valley reveals itself as an industrial quilt of wharfs, factories, warehouses, silos and power plants. And the endless stretch of suburban housing estates. The West is a dumping ground; a sewer of refugees, the migrants, the
poor, the insane, the unskilled and the uneducated. There is a point in my city, underneath the Swanston Street Bridge where you can sit by the Yarra River and contemplate the chasm that separates this town. Look down the river towards the East and there are green parks rolling down to the river, beautiful Victorian bridges sparkle against the blue sky. Face West and there is the smoke-scarred embankment leading towards the wharfs. The beauty and the beast. All cities, all cities depend on this chasm. All cities, from Melbourne to Karachi, New York to Istanbul, Paris to Nairobi, include sewers for the international human refuse that keeps being churned out through war, famine, unemployment, poverty. The insane migrant will pack some bags and leave the shithole they were born in for the promise of better pay and a better life somewhere else.

There is no America. There is no New World. There is no future available to the refo and the wog any more. Nowhere to run, like the song. They don't need factories any more, they have elegantly-sculptured machines powered by microchips. They don't need labour any more. Not now, now that they have the Internet. Nowhere to run, like the song. The sewers keep filling up, they are fucking overflowing and the refuse is choking up the atmosphere. From Singapore to Beijing, from Rio to Johannesburg.

There is a last, and very cherished, urban myth. That every new generation has it better than the one that came before it. Bullshit. I am surfing on the down-curve of capital. The generations after this are not going to build on the peasants' landholdings. There's no jobs, no work, no factories, no wage packet, no half-acre block. There is no more land. I am sliding towards the sewer, I'm not even struggling against the flow. I can smell the pungent aroma of shit, but I'm still breathing.

I watch Serena walk slowly towards the station. A Vietnamese family walk past me, the thin husband holding the hand of a chattering, smiling young girl. The woman walks a little behind, looking into the shop windows. I smile at them and the man returns a hesitant smile back to me. The woman refuses to acknowledge me. They walk past me, up the hill, disappearing in the glare of the sunlight. I watch them, fascinated. A long time ago I was a chattering child, walking with my family along this strip of road, walking up the hill. I'm thinking that in a few years those parents are going to want to kill that chattering child, are going to worry themselves sick over the chattering child. I'm thinking, Christ, Mum and Dad are going to kill me.

My body is still pumped from the drugs. My head is hurting, a tiny pinprick of pain somewhere close to my forehead, a pain that pushes back onto my skull and affects my whole nervous system. My jaw is clenched. My cock feels heavy on my groin, bruised from the sex. I put one foot forward and begin a slow walk towards home. There is the sound of trams, cars, the familiar voices of shopowners, the familiar landscape in which I have spent all my life. I'm beginning to hate this city, hate its fucking familiarity. I want to go away, get out of here. I put on the headphones, press play and the music pushes my thoughts way back to some space in my head where I can't hear them. In the voluptuous thunder and rhythms of the Walkman I disappear and I am out of here.

I pass a couple of street kids on my way up the hill. One's black, one's white, one's wog. They smell of solvents and petrol and are way out of it, eyes rolling to the back of their
heads. I've never done glue; sniffed it once and it burnt my lungs. There is a generation coming after me that is fucking up faster than mine.

The wog kid looks like Johnny. This makes me sad. Is there something I have to apologise to Johnny for? I can't remember.

Johnny tells me all the time, move out kid. He tells me that I'm a faggot and that I'm a faggot for life. Johnny warns me to not go overboard on the chemicals. Watch them kid, he says, they'll dull the brain and they'll dull the soul.

Johnny has Toula. His dresses and skirts are also battle fatigues. He can't remain silent. Silence would kill Johnny.

The sun is very harsh and the hill seems neverending. One foot moves sluggishly after the other. I think of Johnny, think of him calling me gutless in one of his drunken rages. I fantasise that when I get home, I'll yell at Mum and Dad that I am leaving, that I've found a man and I'm going to move in with him. I can feel myself smiling in the open street, dreaming of a little house by the sea with George and me in it. But I smell solvents and the fantasy evaporates under the hot sun's glare. I'm so slow from the come-down that I couldn't say a word to my parents. I couldn't make a sound.

I'm nearly home and maybe it is not glue on the street kids I'm smelling. Maybe I'm smelling the residue of chemicals on my own skin. Johnny tries to tell me things all the time, prepare me for the way the real world works. But I move too sluggishly to care about making it to the real world. Johnny is right but he has Toula.

Drugs keep me quiet. And relatively content.