Chapter 9 – And Now for Something Completely the Same

While glancing over my cliff notes I noticed an annotation from my editor (me) that I wanted more information on my life “Pre-morbid” – a delightful term I picked up from one of the various letters that doctors have written about me and sent to other doctors at various stages of my life.

I also would like to depart from stories of my latter gambling and booze fuelled life to something a bit earlier…

Around the age of 8, as best my memory recollects, I noticed I had a talent for most things creative- I started doing paintings that didn’t end up on the fridge but hung in a nice frame on the wall of not only my house, but relatives houses, I played piano for a long time and then guitar when I had to switch to a cooler instrument for high school, and I’m even writing this book- the first thing over a few hundred words I’ve ever tried writing.

I attribute most of this to a few attributes- relatively high intelligence, good observational skills, reading a lot and a long standing major depressive disorder. There’s nothing that makes it easier to take yourself seriously than being totally self-absorbed, and like I would always say when painting with pastels, it’s easiest to work from black.

Around the age I was old enough to realise my parents were not only regular human beings with their own lives and faults each locked into a loveless and often spiteful marriage I started drinking quite heavily, I was around 14 and became something of a legend, or a spectacle, amongst my friends- a Hodge podge of the not-cool-enough for the cool group and too cool for the nerds (this was before nerds were the new cool).

We borrowed a row boat from somewhere, probably someone’s cool uncle, and freighted two cartons of beer (this is Australian beer, 32 standard drinks to a carton), a bottle of gin, a bottle of Midori and several tanks of nitrous oxide over to a small island on the river. There were about 8 of us at most but I somehow managed to drink an entire carton plus another 4 beers from the second carton and half the gin.

I didn’t vomit, I didn’t even have a hangover. It’s one of those stories that no-one believed except my friends and myself, and I even doubt it myself somehow- despite being there and remembering it in pretty vivid detail (at one point I fell face first into the river, which I noticed the next morning was filled with rocks covered in oysters).

Now as liberal as Australia is with its liquor regulation there’s not a venue in the country that would let a 14 year old into the gaming room, and indeed as I mentioned near the beginning of this story I didn’t start until I was 18. But they have something to cater for the young gambler-to-be: The Skill Tester.

For those who know them by a different name, these are the claw machines filled with stuffed animals or watches or candy. You put in a dollar (20 cents back then) and move the claw into position over your intended prey where it then descends and gently caresses your desired item before moving back to drop the thin air it’s grasped down the chute.

I’d wag school to go play these things, I’d play them in the lunch break at work while I was working in my father’s pharmacy, sometimes I’d throw in some fishing line with a hook and bypass the troublesome claw and niggling requirement for fresh 20c pieces until I eventually had bags full of these toys which I would then take home and blow the crap out of with magnesium and deodorant cans.

My long term memory has never been particularly good, my short term is fine- my girlfriend is endlessly asking me where she left her mobile phone or keys and I can usually tell her where I last saw them, not that I’m looking or that she ever leaves them in the same place- I just recall visual data well, for short periods.

Memories of my childhood were vague even when I was still a child, like cheerios floating around in a bowl of milk. After ten years of dedicating my life to the routine of getting up hung over, going to work late, gambling, drinking, passing out and repeating until the weekend when I’d usually sleep for 40 hours straight the cheerios are now mostly soggy ruins sitting at the bottom of the bowl. But here are a few things I do remember well:

The cheat codes for Wonderboy III: The Dragon’s Trap.

My mother was very keen to get away from the house when she could and loved horses, or horse clubs at least, she was able to rope my brother (older than me by two years) into going to pony club (I went when I was young but gave up after a horse decided it would be easier for me to clear the jumps if it threw me over them) which eventually became full time Equestrian, Cross-Country, Show Jumping and whatever else required being somewhere else with a bunch of horses and no husband. I didn’t mind at the time- I assumed I was just too boring because all I wanted to do was play video games, and I still don’t mind now knowing that she just wanted out of the marriage but wouldn’t put my brother and I through that until we were out of the house.

I bagged and sold horse crap for more money than I’d make in my first few “real” jobs. We had a four-wheeled motorbike for carting the horse crap down to the highway to put on a trailer for $2 a bag. Sometimes we’d tie a sheet of corrugated iron to the back of the bike and call it “The Sled”. Some hapless passenger would then lie on the sheet of iron (don’t forget the safety goggles!) and be hurled around one of the flatter paddocks, usually through as many piles of horse and cow shit as I could swing them through.
We had to put an end to that when my friend Shane came off and caught his wrist on a corner of The Sled, opening one of the veins and getting quite a lot of blood on the bike.

The second time the bike tasted blood was when I was watching my brother practicing show jumping one day. The horse threw him while going over a jump, he landed in front of the horse and then the horse landed on him, crushing his spleen. I had to race him to the highway on the bike to meet the ambulance (the ambulance driver later told me he thought he was going to have to take two people to hospital the way I was driving) whereupon he was taken to hospital. His veins collapsed and he was turning blue- he survived but sans spleen which kept him from joining the army which was going to be his escape from the horse business (he had now well and truly thrown in the towel for that particular vocation), he joined the police force instead- within two years he’d written off three police vehicles and beaten up a bunch of people so I guess he’s happy.

The next soggy cheerio that I can dredge up from the bottom of the bowl is the day I was at home by myself and ignored the sound of one of the horses galloping around a paddock for 5 or 10 minutes. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, I may even have been masturbating (I was at that age where it was done frantically every time you had the house to yourself) which makes me feel even more guilty. Several minutes after the galloping stopped I noticed something felt wrong, I don’t know why the galloping didn’t peak my interest but the silence did. I walked outside and the silence seemed even louder- no dogs or cows or even insects as I recall, and noticed Nida who I will always remember as the horse my brother punched in the nose when it was acting up one day, standing at the top corner of her paddock looking at me.

She was holding her front leg off the ground and as I neared I saw it was not being held so much as dangling, it had been snapped and was held in place only by the twisted skin around the bone. She must have hit a rabbit hole while bolting around the paddock. The fetlock had also been torn and was hanging limp and useless with blood flowing over it and falling onto the grass. I picked some grass for her to chew on which she obliged for me while we waited for the vet to come and put a bullet in her brain.

There are other things I recall: my father lifting my dog Gilby from the back of his truck, he’d been hit by a car, never buy your kid a beagle, they wander too much. And the time I took a gun to school in my guitar case.

You’ve probably noticed most of my memories are miserable, I’d like to say that there’s some good ones, or that I’m probably only remembering the bad ones, but I know I’m not. Because even to this day I have difficulty feeling any kind of positive emotions- I can be playing a video game, watching a movie, getting a blow job, drunk or winning a thousand dollars and all I can think, at best, is “I should be happy”. It’s as if the emotion just doesn’t exist for me anymore, if it ever did.

There was more I wanted to say but this chapter has gone on too long already.