CONTENT WARNING: Drug use, sex, accidental death

So one day I’m texting this guy who lives really really fucking far from my flat. He’s like ‘I’ve got bricks’ and I’m all ‘alright’ et cetera. I was on my way through the city anyway.

I had to pick up another bag from my guy in Flagstaff. I’d run out a few nights earlier because I was thinking about my brother.

The plug is fucking rich. His place is huge and hardly even stinks. It’s at the top of a high-rise, has a wall of glass spanning the city, looking right down on the copshop. He could open a window and piss on them if he wanted to. I drop the cash, slip the bag through a hole in the lining of my jacket. When I get back on the train I can feel everyone sniffing me.

I’m off the dole now. The second I turned twenty-two they cut my payment. So I missed my rent. Landlord asks me how he’s supposed to live, this is his only source of income. For a year I paid him to harass me, rip me off, fuck me in the arse. Turns out he’ll do it for free.

He kicks me to the gutter.

So the pigs pick on me, shake me out. They call me things like ‘NFA’ and ‘intoxicated.’ Other than that I keep out of trouble. I think about living with my brother. I can’t stop thinking about him. Instead I rely on lonely old blokes in the suburbs looking for a bit of male company.

Tonight’s lonely old bloke is Colin, who looks just like my old landlord. Except he pays me to fuck me in the arse. Colin loves a bit of ket, so I’ll give him a couple lines and he’ll load me up with bricks.

It’s a long ride to Broady. He lets me in but doesn’t talk or look at me. We take it easy. We get blotto, blasted, all bricked up. We watch South Park. He fucks me in the arse.

I crash.

His room smells like sweat, mould, ash. He’s slung out on the mattress like a sun-dried elastic band. Morning light leaks over his pale nude body.

I slide off the side of the bed, don boxers, rack a dart, slip out the backdoor. There’s a housemate ripping cones on a beaten-up backyard couch – topless, hairy, and round like some huge beugy testicle. I use his lighter.

He goes by Dan the Man. We get chatting. He tells me Colin is a ‘piece of work,’ but won’t explain. He tells me he’s so fat because he has chronic pain. When he sits down it’s a six hour commitment. Says he’d never see a doctor, he can self-medicate for cheap. He chokes back another cone. Says he sells enough to smoke an ounce a week for free.

I ask if he ever sweats over getting sick in the lungs from all that, but I can tell he always sweats regardless. He tells me he won’t get sick, that weed cures cancer and doctors create it. He tells me I already have it, he can tell by looking at me, he’ll bet I got vaccines as a baby. I tell him I’d rather have cancer than polio. He tells me I’m an idiot.

Doesn’t take long for him to defrost the Nazi rhetoric. Goes on and on and on, sweating so much I see steam rising. I tell him he reminds me of my brother, he was scared of needles too. I once told my primary school teacher that for breakfast my brother ate smoke out of a Gatorade bottle.

My brother started to vomit for days in a row. Every couple of weeks like clockwork he’d be spluttering black mud from his guts. Everyone said it was the weed, he said it was tiny plastics in the Gatorade. That argument went on ’til he finally caved, and he spent the best part of a year sweating like a pig in a stab vest, trying to quit.

I think if he’d known in the end he'd be killed by a car, he wouldnt’ve gone to all the trouble.