Ghetto

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You couldn’t look at them and let it show. It meant that you had to hyper fixate on aspects of them, details like their clothes and their gait. It helped you know them, you had to be secure. They were all a bit dumb. You noticed that they hunched and stayed together, and they kept their heads down, stoned. You had done that too with others and you hoped it would be different. They seemed to focus in and out around you and never really on you. It made you nervous about a tic or flinch, things that may draw their attention to you. There was some sort of game happening that hazed everyone rigid and cold. They were used to it and could be settled in it, but you were terrified. They were brothers, you weren’t.  You didn’t know what brotherhood was in their way. You didn’t really care.

The door was obscured by shelving, but you stared at it anyway. You had an impulse to hide out down the street, or better yet, run, but you knew that leaving was a failure and you would not recover. The bongs weren’t happening, they were making it worse, but it was an insult not to take it when they packed it. You knew how to smoke, the mechanics of it were old, but you didn’t know how to handle the anxiety and fear that came along with it. They knew it and worked it into you. You were sometimes grateful that they spared you out of a sense of loyalty to the ritual of the dope, and because you were younger and faggyand they wanted to go easy on you. You hated them for that. The dope was a constant between you, you were addicted, you needed it, but you didn’t like it now.

The punches they threw at each other from time to time were harder than you were used to. They never threw them at you, they always held off. You hated them, but that was not the point. They hated you, but that wasn’t either. You had to prove yourself, but this was too hard, the world they were in. You needed to be there though, you didn’t understand it yet. You needed it to understand how you would leave them behind in the end.

You would make your exit eventually by buying a gram. They pretended that they were doing you a favour by selling it to you and you would go and smoke it at home. You hoped someone you liked would come, sometimes you hoped that person would stay. You’d sort through your paraphernalia at home and watch the Isle of Wight festival, settling into ideas of more mellow parties like the ones you went to further out northwest, where people didn’t air kick at each other to keep the status quo and grams were shared more evenly in celebration of the fact that someone was holding. You would head back there though, to that house, when you needed to bottom out, you didn’t want to be alone, and you knew that isolation was death to you.

People dropped in and dropped out around there, a falling out felt fatal. The losers in that game would prowl around and pick up other people that were equally outside of things. You met this fate a few times, you were grateful for the break, but you suffered withdrawals from the lack of excitement, so you lit things and broke things and talked and talked, you bared your soul or bought cigarettes endlessly, there was no other way of letting loose the reigns. That sort of darkness had a hold on everything there, it’s something most people know you think.

The weekend was for parties and then connecting went into overdrive. It was a constant process, there was just so much shit at home and at school, wading though it was endless without fun. You didn’t like the handshakes that you gave day in day out on high rotation, they kept things in place that you screamed about in disgust in a place you couldn’t reach, when you went to parties you got to laugh at that stuff and have a drink with people: the heroes who had honour worked into the ground in disgust.

Cruel barbs were so common that your life became a spar. You adapted them into a flow that suited you and your friends. There was a constant need to know how to come back, put downs were an artform and you needed to be quick. Getting it offside or not taking the punch that followed it would put you out of the fray again to meet a lonely fate. Bullying was secondary to this way of life, there was no way to separate the life out to form that idea. Boys who did not take it well were put on the scrapheap. They were getting ready for a life that was not yours.

There was no other way to look after each other for the way they saw it. They are older now, they have jobs, they have families, just like everywhere. But they had it harder and you feel they need to be known.

There was no need to go down that far, but there was. There was always music that geed you along, but that didn’t explain it. You needed the feeling as you went to that house even though it made you ill. Having nerves wasn’t an adequate way to describe it. You knew you had to go. You were required there 2-3 times a month after you had cycled through your other friends, and it was time to bottom out and go to hell for what you had already done. You’d walk through the neighbourhood with an admixture of feelings. There was illness there in your stomach of the exact quality you had after you had choofed with your friend on the holidays and thrown up tangerine Oasis drink into a bin. It was of that exact quality, and it sat at the bottom of it all. The meanness of them bore down on you from above, and you accepted that was the world, and you had to prove and make it with them to survive. There was no evidence to suggest anything else, everyone from all the suburbs around were the same. If you stayed at home with your books, you were marking yourself for a kind of death by isolation that would be the end of you. You would not be able to go out again anywhere in safety if you stayed at home.

You wanted to keep reading and you wanted to inhabit places like St Petersburg or 50s America that came so alive for you in books and discussions with your family. Those worlds seemed reasoned and enlightened regarding aspects of your identity that you laughed at them about. You didn’t realise you were inhabiting a heroic world yourself where honour hadn’t ever been deconstructed and was needed to make sense of the world. There was a bluntness to it that didn’t satisfy you even though you knew that already, you wanted to be so sure of the principles that kept everyone certain of things, but you were already dissenting when you got there, in their world, and they hated you for being so glib.

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You had nowhere to go for a bit, so you fell in with kids who were blonde. You didn’t know how else to know yourself in a neighbourhood of Commodores and black hair and Eurotechno. They were racist in ways that made you cringe, but you then knew where all those racist attitudes of the older generation that you felt were misguided found their expression with your generation. You felt a twinge in your blood as if they were some sort of distorted home that was contradicted by their severe lashing out each other as if that was in their veins and they wanted to extinguish each other. It was hate, not racism, though it popped up with them, and it destroyed everyone, of all nationalities, which we all know anyway.

They hung out in a place that was out of the way and the campfires they built with garden stakes and lit with petrol were a way of consolidating the cohesion that they couldn’t cultivate on their own. There were empty cans and bottles everywhere, and all week long they would meet there. School was something talked about obliquely as a place where someone was belted, or someone was humiliated in a notable way. It was journalism in a way, and it happened everywhere. At home it must have been very different, their parents wanted them to go to school you suspect.

You had no way of twisting out of that group either, though wandering away was tolerated in a way the other groups wouldn’t allow. The freedom was coupled with a sense of debauchery which meant there were no caps on drinks and bongs, even on Mondays or Wednesdays.

They can’t have survived like that, and they wouldn’t have. If they have, they deserve music like anyone. You never saw them much after a while after they accused you and put shit on you. The fact that you never saw them around after that perhaps means that they weren’t supposed to survive like that anyway. The likely idea that they now have jobs and mortgages doesn’t compute, it creates disconnect that doesn’t marry up to what you knew of them

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Loyalty had cache. If you intended to stick by your friends, you meant see it through. You knew to play at being dodgy, but you also learned how to reel it in. Cruelty had it a big place in it, it took the steam out of any imcovenient sentiment. The person you’d dished it to could never cry, it was a given not to be seen to cry.  You had to accept though that your jibes would come around to you. These were the rules. You had to hit back, and you had to hit harder than the person who dished it to you, but you had to learn when to be a little sparing. It was an art and a lifestyle, but it was designed to have you survive a life that was always supposed to end up harsh. You know better now.

You suspect that that was the way of all things for boys in high school, but where you lived it was so common that it had to be coded into groups. The groups had rules that passed in common round the north and west. Those boys would often laugh if you called them gangs and you suspect they still will. They were sometimes just a way to survive with some pride. Now it’s apparent they need to be discussed somehow and consulted on what happened there.

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India

🙏👹

You had to know how to walk away (for the next time you needed to). You were dragged on a holiday with your family and their friends to India at 15. Your friends at home continued on. You walked through New Delhi looking for something away from your family and you found a way to score hash in a building that was advertising tours through Rajasthan. You wanted a story for people back home. The man was sleazy and sold you 8 grams for 30,000 Rupees. You thought it was rip but you didn’t know, you were a kid. You smoked it in a Hookah pipe while your sister dozed on the other side of the room because your parents put you both together in a discount 4-star hotel that was nevertheless epic and grand and exotic.

You later looked over the sides of mountains in hill forts and gazed out of bus windows at apocalyptic scenes of slaughtered animal parts in piles on the side of the road, and skeletal kids in Dhotis running through gutters. You watched the desert canola fields of Rajasthan roll by and the happy untouchables strolling on the side and inviting men to see them in truck stops. You were young, you hadn’t seen anything yet, it was awesome and epic, but your parents were tired. You all anchored in Goa, and you sat by the beach and smoked hash in forested areas that you imagined were the jungle. You thought you would be attacked by tigers, the paranoia was so intense, and you didn’t know what that was yet, but you are now allowed the idea that it was trauma. You still don’t know it yet, and that’s the way it is. It keeps repeating over and over. You barely smoke now, no one should, you think, but especially at that age, you have brain damage now.

You were so stupid that you transported hash on a flight from Bombay to Goa. The man that pulled you aside knew you were guilty by the sweat and panic on your face. He grinned kindly like an uncle, and you knew something new about life by that. He let you pass onto the plane in some sort of ancient avuncular wisdom that you still can’t decipher.

You watched your parents stroll off arm in arm into the darkness of the streets of Agra. You found blood in the sun and the smoke and the mist and it rose over tangled electricity wires that were too awesome to contemplate. It was God. You look at them where you are now and you don’t know why it affected you like that until you think about it. Here it seems small, a spectacle that you miss, but Australia has a sinister energy that you know to be whatever that was there here at home. It’s in the tangled gums. You didn’t know the jungle, what it was like, it was suburban in their way, but you didn’t know, you were looking for her, you were looking for God, that gang life was gone, but you didn’t know yet, you’d get home to new friends, and they didn’t give a shit about all that. You parents were tired, you didn’t know. You only know now, how stupid you’d been, you’ve gone back to your past now to survey the damage, the cleanup will take forever, and that’s how it should be. You knew you needed something there, but you didn’t know what it was, you only know now….

That wasn’t India though, you missed it, the people around you may have been beautiful. You saw that quality first settle in gaggles of beggars with no arms and mangled legs, and you found that romance was hollow and worn out like a Hollywood film in the story of the Taj Mahal. You learned part of the world and how it works, you were allowed to wander through beaches in Goa alone. You saw sleazy men smoking dope in stalls and met girls your age who were going to be sold into slavery for a Dowry, but you didn’t learn, you wanted to go and get more, you weren’t listening yet…

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👴🏻🙏

You’ve gone to the back of the shopping centre in the area you live now to smoke a butt you found. You are quitting again and you are so raw with nerves and anger from God knows where that you need to smoke it. You wish you’d have quit years ago, but you were stupid enough to cling to them while things went wrong over and over again in your life. This time you are bereft after moving here, to a placed you uncomprehendingly knew as affluent. Everything has moved on, so there is no reason to smoke and associate this new turn and new life with cigarettes again. You find a spot next to some pallets and spark it up. You feel a rush that feels like ecstasy and you know it is poison, so you tell yourself that. You walk back using the path you cut off to get there and you see some whippet bottles on the side of the footpath in the grass. You want to walk past, you don’t want to care, but the kids in the neighbourhood might see them and think it is cool to inhale them as well. You think things could go on and on like this, an unbroken line through life where things just are this, are just tragic, just endless whippet bottles and demoralisation. You pick up the cannisters and put them in a bag lying next to them. There’s no bin so you carry them home to throw them out.