KID MEETS JUNKIE

I love how the Kid has no clue what's going on here. Reminds me of the time I was working in a supermarket and an old lady approached me seeking the direction of the 'condiments'.  Lets just say I thought she meant contraception and asked as much. She did not appreciate that.

I’m no Fitzroyalty, I’m not nuts deep in the milieu of faux New-New-Romantic chic that the cool kids are resplendent in these days as I probably lived through too much of the 80’s the first time around, but I had thought of myself as at least landed gentry.  That if I wasn’t a part of the beating heart itself, I still knew its cadence, had my finger on the pulse. I was holding onto my youthful hipness/general relevance without the need to yet grip too tightly and show the white knuckles that are a dead set giveaway.  But a little of my cool has died and my forearms are tired from holding on that much tighter.

It was a Thursday night and I was in a weirdly disjointed state. It was for the promise of a night with the soothingly uncertain conversation of Biz and Dig born out over stewed meats and Czech beer orderable only by the litre that I stiffened a will that was only ephemerally committed to its surroundings.  I stepped out of my joint and the streets were warm and grey and expectant, the kind of quiet waiting that encourages introspection not interaction and the iPod bubble that I immersed myself in made that removal even more acute.  Those cool kids are all walking around to their own personal soundtracks and fair enough I might have been listening to an audiobook but surely its all about the look isn’t it?  And to the outside eye I could just as easily have been lost in some electro-pop Miami low-fi collective soundscape experiment.  For some fucked up reason I started walking, pushing my bike, an unexamined walking.  When I’d taken about ten steps the stupidity of pushing a working-order bike for no reason dawned on me and I jumped on and peddled off thinking more about the words in my ears than the world at my feet but even they were only half engaged with.  I thought I was running late, I thought about how it was dumb to ride iPoded, I thought about how I hoped the ATM god would smile on me when I stopped there. Turning left into Rose the buildings washed by.  I thought about why the fuck I was walking in the first place, I thought about the words, but all the thoughts were distant.  He stepped off the curb and slipped into my version materialising out of all-background world, “rrroraggh mmrranddd rarrrr.” 

Of course I couldn’t make out a word in my little Me bubble, just that he had spoken and that it had probably been to me.  Sure in the retelling of this bit I could bang on about decisions, about the ‘what I should do’s’.  Let the natural force of my momentum carry me off in a no-loose-change kinda way?  Or stop and engage with humanity? But the truth is that there was no deliberation, it all just soft of happened. I braked and rolled in a long leftward arc, looping back to where he stood in the street.  Maybe the deciding is a subconscious thing, needing of only the briefest moment to realise all the potential permutations, exclude them all but one to set you on that course so as to seem such a natural thing.  I slowed, stopped, put my feet down, pressed pause, took my ear-phones out.  Sorry mate, what?  I took part of the guy in with that first look. He seemed to be moving.  A girl stood back on the footpath behind him.  A whole bunch of thoughts slid across my serene calm as my mind idled but I couldn’t be arsed grasping any of them, “Orr mait ya know where the plug eschange is?”  He spoke with the full force of the Aussie accent and that always makes me think about Ned Kelly.  I guess that’s the persecuted Mick blood that my pops always says is in me.

Step One: Assessment. He may not have looked 100% but he did look like he was functioning within normal operating parameters.  He didn’t appear completely washed out, a little grungy verging on scungy maybe, but still completely acceptable in an inner-urban, (post-)GFC way.  He had a backpack and a cap and a jumper tied around his waist.  It was the jumper that should have set the bells to ringing now that I think about it.  Dudes were definitely tying jumpers around waits in the 80’s but that part didn’t make it back in a fashion cycle largely focused on neon. 

And this is exactly where the first little bit died, my cool started to atrophy, you don’t need to look too close.  “Ahh (brain stalling for time as it tried to become co-present) dunno mate.  D’you mean… electrical outlets? Power points?” My own world wasn’t a centre of awsomeness it was a place far, far distant from that, sort of like a house in a Caroline Springs personal hell. He didn’t look at me in confusion.  He didn’t look irate, but fuck what was that moving about?  Sort of a jerky inability to hold his body – all of it – firm in one place.  This death was not going to be quick or painless.  “Narrrr (so many r’s in that no). Ya know mait, the fit exchange.” No facial expressions, no normal non-verbal language, just the wobble, a constant jerky struggle against his body doing things that he didn’t want it to do.  I wasn’t sure exactly where he was.  Was he blurring? Is this guy the missing link who’s going to reconcile the great gulf between general relativity and quantum mechanics because damn straight he was a giant super string, a macro-sized version of the uncertainty principle? Did he have Parkinson’s?  Confusion breeds confusion and I was begetting like a catholic family whose favourite tune was Every Sperm is Sacred.

Here though kind reader, is the only tenuous strand in my very, very weak defence.  On the corner directly behind him and smack bang in the middle of my field of vision was the post-apocalyptic gym Crossfit.  The badass Mad Max of personal training where Hard Yakka ads are played out live as people whose arses are as big as their wallets hit giant truck tyres with sledge hammers MOTHER FUCKERS!!.  Fitness for when society has collapsed and we, the broken remnants, are eking out a desperate shadow of existence amongst the detritus.  “Ahh (brain still stalling, not very sharp was I) you mean the gym?  Crossift? The gym?” Either the jerky-wobble had intensified or, as I suspect, I was being dragged out of that comfort-goop in which I usually ensconce myself and further toward Reality and the powers of observation demanded of being there.  “Orgh narrr fuck’t” It wasn’t aggressive, it wasn’t frustrated, it just was. “Doen wah-re bowdit then mait.”  There’s that accent again.  The kind of quintessential Australian accent that hates akubras, that reminds you although this is a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, that really there are fuck all people who don’t live in the big bad city.  And with that he walked off executing a dramatic body flicking that matched perfectly the jerky-wobble thing.  The girl was waiting for him passively and I looked at her as she fell in beside him.  She was sort of tidy in a lived way, a used way.

As the two headed down the street away from me I slowly turned my bike completing the circle that had brought me to him in the first place (Symbolism 101) and peddled off sans iPodding. The whole interaction was probably 20 seconds but now distance and the inevitable reflection that it provokes was unifying the pieces to very gently click into place and form a whole.  It was tectonic rather than cataclysmic this coming together and so I wasn’t jumped by my stupidity or bum-rushed by realisation.  It was odd how light death’s touch was, rendered quietly and calmly, it settled on me softly. Obviously I had just sought to point a conscientious junkie looking for a clean needle with which to take away the pain first toward home-handyman’s heaven Bunning’s and then to a gym.  My street smarts are undeniable.