The Ice Age (14 page)

A week after everything died down, thanks to some stern words from the school headmaster, I got another phone call: ‘I'm one of those guys you've been writing all that shit about. You're not going to get away with this. You better watch your back; you won't get away with this. One day, one day, maybe years and years after school, there'll be a massive gang of us, and we'll get you and your family, too,' he said.

But I
had
gotten away with it. Despite this victory, I left school, and finished it by correspondence. Academic and sporting achievements followed. I had my first real group of friends in a long while. I officially came out as gay.

Although my parents responded reasonably well to my coming out — both said they didn't really mind — my relationship with them was becoming increasingly difficult. They told me they didn't want to think about me having sex. Dad said he thought it was just a phase. I had only ever heard him mention gay people twice; both times were to say that they ‘made him sick'. When I caught crabs, Mum yelled at me about having a responsible sex life. Dad wanted me to move out. My sister had already moved out, and was estranged from the family after a bad fight with Mum.

Mum had particular difficulties with the fact that I now dressed in op-shop clothes and had friends. She would call me when I was at a friend's house, crying and demanding I come home. When I came home, I had to take off my op-shop clothes and dress myself in the surf clothes I used to wear when I was fourteen. Eventually, she said I wasn't allowed to dress in the clothes I'd bought for myself in the house, and I had to keep them at a friend's place.

One terrible fight led to my mum throwing me out of the house. I hadn't finished Year 12 at the time. I had nowhere to stay and no money. I begged a friend to let me stay with him, and I stole all my food. Determined to survive with flair, I dressed up as a ‘person with a disability' — complete with neck brace and op shop clothes — stole a raffle book, and went door-knocking, asking for money for the ‘U/21 disabled hockey team to compete in the upcoming national championships in Canberra'.

By this stage, while I was selling stolen raffle tickets in order to eat, my parents had taken advantage of a new tax-incentive scheme called negative gearing, and now owned three properties. Then I got a call from my tutor who told me, ‘Your mother is not well at the moment. She needs to go the doctor and get herself put on medication. You probably need to stay away until she gets better.'

After a couple of weeks, my mum rang and apologised, and I moved back home. I kept going with Year 12, but then halfway through — out of nowhere — things started to change. I felt tired, unmotivated, and sulky. I didn't want to leave the house. I felt a strange sense of dread and disaster every time I did go out. I had started spending time with a group of gay guys who lived in Prahran, but over time I found them more and more confident, good-looking, and intimidating, and eventually I cut my ties with them. Once I got my marks halfway through the year, I realised they would be enough to get me into an Arts degree at La Trobe University, and after that I did the bare minimum, including during exams, where I walked out after the minimum one-hour time.

Often, the onset for serious mental illness — such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia — occurs at about the age of seventeen or eighteen. Until then, the individual might be weird, or misbehaved, or withdrawn, or normal. My uncle Gary didn't develop schizophrenia until he experienced acute work stress at the age of thirty-five. But when he was seventeen, he spent a period of about two years hardly speaking, not socialising, and just sitting in his room. It was possible I had caught the family disease. I had certainly caught one sort of family disease — an obsession with appearances. Every time I saw myself in the mirror, I saw nothing but the world's ugliest person, and assumed that everybody saw the same — and then they saw a faggot.

By the time I finished high school, I had trouble leaving my room under any circumstances. When I did, high-pitched alarms went off inside my head, and a prickly little echidna spun around slowly in my stomach. I was at the point of having to drum up the courage even to go my local shopping centre. Once I walked through the bushland next to my house to the bus stop across the road. I took a deep breath that soon turned into rushed panting, and walked back through the bushland and into my house, where I didn't leave my room for another couple of weeks. I was spooked by the slightest noise. I watched TV all day, and smoked in my room. I read
Smash Hits
magazine, and spent hours with my headphones on, imagining I was a pop star — as if I were thirteen again.

A few months later, I started my philosophy degree at La Trobe, in Melbourne's outer-northern suburbs. I missed the first two weeks of the course because of ‘my friend, the echidna'. When I finally made it to campus, I left a lecture to hide in the toilets for a good hour, before catching the bus and going back home. My room became both a refuge and a scene of minor carnage. I shaved uneven patches out of my hair and dyed it green. I started cutting myself with a kitchen knife, and, at one stage, I had three piercings under my lip.

Eventually, I met the town's hippies with their makeshift homes, their tepees, and was introduced to their magic herbs, tea-tree cleaning products, and all-night Shamanic shindigs in the bush. I adored their healthy eating, near-asexuality, and earthy liberalism. A few of the women invited me along to my first-ever rave. These events, held deep in the forest, were a wonderful mixture of counter-culture, individualism, and archetypal tribalism — I felt as if I had found my tribe. I do wonder now if I would have liked it so much were it not for the drugs — at my first rave, I tried my first ecstasy. So while I salvaged the year and managed to get out of my room, there was a caveat on my newfound freedom: I couldn't go out without first taking so much ecstasy that I lost sense of who I was and where I was going.

I tried ‘speed' one night in mid-1998, when we couldn't get any E. I didn't get as ‘off chops' on the white powder, but I rather liked the fact that it gave me confidence without turning me into a blubbering mess. Many of my friends used syringes, which seemed exciting and edgy. I was very curious, but the hippie women were reluctant to show me how to do it because they said I had ‘addictive tendencies'. However, after a few months of my nagging, they gave me my first intravenous shot of amphetamines in a glittery station wagon — which the owner called her ‘unicorn' — outside a converted mansion nightclub in St Kilda.

So I guess it went like this: the amphetamines gave me confidence and, even more than that, a window into an idealised, transcendental reality — which, for all I thought at the time, was actually a mystical
parallel
reality. At the start of 1999, just before my nineteenth birthday, I popped the ecstasy pill to end all ecstasy pills at an outdoor bush doof at a place inappropriately named Mount Disappointment. The world took on a wonderfully cartoonish flavour as I thought,
This is how I always wanted life to be
. This led me on a voyage to rediscover that high, and when other ecstasy pills didn't do the trick, I turned again to needles. I claimed study allowance from Centrelink — even though I never went to uni — and with the proceeds I pumped my veins full of ‘speed': monthly, then weekly, then during the week. I eventually stopped going out to raves and dance parties, and just stayed home and took drugs instead. This went on for a good twelve months; I was a ‘pleasure glutton', besotted by the broom that swept all the dread away. It was like alchemy, like magic — who wouldn't want that?

According to Jung, one of the most universal and universally misunderstood archetypes is Mercurius — aka the Roman god, Mercury — known for his speed and mobility. In the ancient art of
alchemy, the Earth's three principle substances were mercury, sulphur, and salt — in fact, the Sanskrit word for alchemy is
Rasavātam,
which means ‘the way of mercury'. Jung saw Mercurius as the essence of the unconscious. He also believed that Mercurius was the ‘trickster' archetype — a shape-shifter who could change gender and meanings, who was ambiguous, paradoxical, and duplicitous. A destroyer, Mercurius is also volatile, meaningful, and difficult to contain. According to Jung, it is only through Mercurius that we can see the fullness of our psyche, including evil.

The more I injected ‘speed', the more the meanings of things started to change and to take on a sinister turn. I would be having a rapid-fire conversation with someone, and everything they said would sound as if it had a deliberate, sly, tricky, persecutory double meaning. Language, at times, totally disintegrated. I would take odd words out of somebody's sentences when they were talking, and I would think they were directed at me. Somebody might mention ‘underwear', and I would think they had caught me masturbating. Or somebody would be talking about a guy they hated called ‘Pete', and I would think they were passive-aggressively telling me in code what they hated about me. Most of the time I would be able to find my way in the conversation and realise I was being paranoid. But then came a day, after a year or more of building up, when I couldn't snap out of it at Cassie's — where it felt as if the apocalypse had come. Mercurius was, perhaps, riding around with me that day. In doing so, it revealed a painful, dark shadow.

After my psychotic breakdown, the clouds seemed to clear — it was as if a cyst had been burst open, and I could start to live again. The anxiety eased. I went back to uni. The shadow had come into light. The psychosis had proved a creative starting point. Things were starting to change — both for me, and in another part of the world ...

In the rugged, remote, wildlife-rich mountains covering a corner of Burma (now Myanmar), Laos, and Thailand, the monsoon rains hadn't come for three years. Amid the hills was an area that was more or less controlled by a renegade ethnic gathering called the United Wa State Army. The military wing of a fringe Burmese political group formed after the collapse of the Burmese Communist Party in 1989, the army took control of the land bordering Thailand, as well as the region's opium poppy fields. In 1997, South-East Asia still accounted for well over half of the world's opium production. As the new millennium came, the drought was broken, and was followed by abnormal flooding and frost in Burma.

It would prove to be the drought before the storm in more ways that one. Drugs were the main source of the army's income, and they began searching for alternatives.

Chapter Five

Rise and fall

BECK, AGE NINETEEN,
gave birth during Melbourne's spectacularly hot, fire-ridden summer of 1998. A beautiful rosy-cheeked, hot-tempered child, Hayley was born at the Ferntree Gully Hospital on 11 February, and returned with her mother about a week later to a rented, non-air-conditioned share house in Rowville in Melbourne's flat, sprawling south-east suburbs.

Many of Beck's adolescent tendencies had continued into adulthood. If somebody in town believed in ghosts, or had a bad deformity, or had spent most of their life in jail, you could rest assured that Beck would track them down and be knocking on their door with a bottle of goon, ready to entertain.

Along her travels, she got to know one man named Barry, a former television-station electrician who'd hurt himself at work and then became lost in his own mind and its many theories — including one that Easter eggs were actually grenades wrapped in foil. Barry, in turn, introduced Beck to Nick while she was pregnant. He was a tall, muscular, kind-of-French-looking, handsome lad. Aged twenty-seven when they met, Nick hadn't spent a single birthday out of prison in his entire adult life. He was a big fellow, but not usually a violent one. In fact, Nick was a bit of an intellectual; he read Dostoevsky and maths textbooks when he was in prison, and took classes in physics. When he was out of prison, he stole at every opportunity. His main trade was robbing houses, but he also robbed service stations — sometimes with a weapon (although his physical presence was often enough to get the attendant to cooperate) — when he got desperate.

Nick and Beck got together, and he moved into the Rowville house when Beck was six months pregnant. When she entered the late stages of her pregnancy, he would come home after a busy day with new toys, prams, and electronic goods. Beck was always uncomfortable with stealing, though no man had ever lavished her with such gifts. She told me she often felt terribly guilty knowing that somebody came home to find their baby's goods missing.

Home robberies became at least a weekly event for Nick and some of his friends — ‘rorts', they called them. They often sold the goods at second-hand stores, or traded them for pot, acid, and ecstasy.

On one occasion, when Nick and his friend Jason had cased at least a dozen homes in one particular area of Rowville and had made their way out the side window of a house with a few watches, phones, and entertainment consoles, they noticed a police car gliding toward them as they made their escape in their car. The police sirens screeched and their lights flashed, and Jason hit the accelerator. A chase ensued through the labyrinth of Rowville's monotonous terrace-roofed suburbia, and when they got to the first traffic lights, the police instructed them through a loudspeaker to pull over and surrender; instead, Jason revved the car, and reversed into the front of the police car, over and over, in an attempt to blow up its engine.

Police cars are built to withstand such force, however, and the chase continued into neighbouring Lysterfield. At the next traffic lights, a panicked Jason — young and thus far without a criminal record — gave himself up. Nick made a run for it, until the police found him about to get on a bus a kilometre away.