HAMMERED:
MEMOIR OF AN ADDICT
by
G.N. Braun
PUBLISHED BY
LegumeMan Books at Smashwords
Copyright © 2012 by G.N. Braun
Cover & Design © 2012 by Spatchcock
isbn: 978-0-9871592-7-4
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Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For Dawn:
You’re ALWAYS there for me. I couldn’t have finished this without you.
Thanks and much love to David, Leah, Michael, Charley, Naomi and Julian for all the love and support, Scott Tyson, Wendy , Steve Gerlach, Brett McBean, Leigh Haig, and, of course, the Legumeman guys and gals (Matt, Rob and Brooke).
You all helped in many ways.
And last, but never least, for Mum and Dad. Thank you!
INTRODUCTION
This is a painfully sharp account of a life that turned around. It avoids the clichés of memoirs of addiction that are “inspiring” and “redemptive”, although it is that finally, in spades. Along the way though, and what I admire about it most, it’s that it’s gutter truthful about the simple, brutal waste of innocence that drug dependence is — on the hour. Most importantly, and what moves this story into a higher register and the realm of larger social concern, is it’s recognition of the insidious nature of self-denial, which is the most dangerous and widespread drug there will ever be. Neil Young laid it down, ‘A little part of it in everyone.’
Because of the nature of the drug life involved, many people will find connections with the writing of people like William Burroughs, but I actually see an older linkage to the work of Malcolm Lowry, who wrote so poignantly of alcoholism, lost hope and hope regained.
GN Braun is a writer who stays out of both his own shadow and light, and lets you decide which best suits. The message is that this all could happen to you, or to someone you know and love. It’s actually remarkably easy to go down slow — because that’s the way it happens. Maybe we all can survive our wrong turns.
I’d add that we are given here a finely edged portrait of a special and complex part of the city of Melbourne, which is well worth reading in its own right. As Sly Stone, one of my countrymen who has had more than a little trouble with drugs would say: “You can’t get to it if you haven’t been through it.”
This is a hard journey well shared and a book that risks real sadness to tell its human truth.
-Kris Saknussemm
Heroin is an illegal opioid that slows the brain and central nervous system functions. It's commonly known as 'smack', 'slow' or 'hammer'.
Visit the Hammered blog at:
http://beenhammered.blogspot.com.au
September 2005 – Richmond, Melbourne.
The place seemed appropriate. The floor was wet with God knows what, and it stank like a cesspool. Scrawled graffiti, reminiscent of hieroglyphics, lined the dirty, peeling walls. Webs spun by spiders long dead hung thick in the corners. Cigarette butts, fit wrappers, plastic spoons and syringes littered the rough concrete floor, punctuated now and then by a used condom or a crushed cigarette packet.
A pair of legs stuck out from one of the cubicles, feet splayed apart as though in death and one jeans leg soaking up some unidentified puddle from the floor, the denim already wet halfway to the knee. Their owner wasn’t deceased; just asleep. The deep, dark sleep that heroin gives you. I’d checked when I came in: we didn’t want to be involved in anything official if someone else happened to enter the public toilet and found us shooting up next to a corpse. I looked over at Carolyn, stoned out of her mind, and wondered just where we were going. Life was shit and not getting any better. We were both unemployed and both heroin addicts. Even though I was a nurse, I hadn’t worked in years, too busy looking for easy money and the next score.
Here we were, off our trees again on heroin, sitting near the vomit of the dealer we had scored off. He’d swallowed the hammer when the cop grabbed him. Most dealers keep their gear sealed in water-balloons just in case. It makes it easy to vomit them back up, give them a wash and get back to selling. After being released from the police station without being charged, he had gone straight to the public toilets and drank a heap of salt-laced water.
I followed him into the toilet-block because I knew him from the street. The name he used with customers was Johnny. I knew he usually had good stuff and that his sizes were better than normal for street gear. Just as I walked into the toilet block, he threw up everywhere. The ballooned packages stood out in the stinking pool of vomit.
I bought two bile-covered deals from him with our last seventy dollars and, as he left, called Carolyn in for our hit of smack. At the time, I thought I was doing the right thing, but now I see the strange logic of giving poison to the one I loved.
Smack was our way of life. We lived to score, and scored to live.
I mulled up the hammer in a spoon and we had our taste. As I packed up our injecting gear, capping the syringes after rinsing them out, I wondered why other junkies felt the need to leave their used works lying around uncapped for someone to stick themselves with. It only took a second to pick everything up, and junkies lived with enough guilt as it was without adding more.
I felt all warm and fuzzy, relaxed for the first time that day. Usually, I had maybe an hour to enjoy it before I had to start thinking about getting some cash for the next score, but it was late and payday was tomorrow.
I had a pretty good system going. I would steal books from the bigger department stores and sell them to second-hand bookshops in the Eastern suburbs. The owners asked no questions and were always willing to take as many as I could get. In two hours I could steal enough to get a couple of hundred bucks, enough for a half-gram of gear
At this point, I had no real habit driving me, so I could afford to relax and enjoy the stone. We were in the women’s toilets, where there were more stalls to hit up in. We’d tried to go to the disabled stall, with its own tap and more privacy, but some other junkie must have beaten us there. They were everywhere these days.
I looked up as a young girl, no more than fifteen or sixteen but an addict from the look of her, pushed through the door from the outside and went into one of the cubicles without giving us a second glance. Day-to-day life on drugs is never easy.
* * * * *
The best place for scoring drugs used to be St Kilda, but these days it was Richmond or Footscray. They took over as the heroin centres of Melbourne, and we knew Richmond so that was where we went to get the best deals on the best gear.
I looked over at the woman who used to be the love of my life sitting half-awake in that toilet in Richmond, and for the millionth time wished that things were different.
I finished packing our kit and went to rouse Carolyn so we could go sit in the park and just kick back and zone out for a while.
‘C’mon, darl. Let’s get out of this shithole,’ I said, unsure of whether I meant the toilet, the suburb or the lifestyle.
‘Yeah, righto. Y’wanna sit in the car for a bit before we go?’
‘We could sit in the park,’ I offered. ‘It’s a beautiful day.’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ she replied.
In the old days, I’d need to find a way to earn some cash within an hour or two, one that wouldn’t mess with my conscience too much. No bag snatches for me, no mugging of old ladies to get their pension cheques. I stole from the bigger stores, not from someone who worked forty hours a week to put food on the family table. Even an addict had to have some morals, however skewed they were.
A moral junkie. Is that an oxymoron?
I sometimes felt that I was so far off course that my moral compass was turning in circles.
Throughout my addiction, I hurt a lot of people; most often the ones who were closest to me. That was the life of an addict. It was easier to touch someone who cared for a few dollars, giving them a sob story that was far from the truth, than it was to hit up strangers.
Lying together on the grass, stoned and staring up at the clouds churning across the sky, it all seemed so distant. I was numb from the struggle. I didn’t have the will to go on like this anymore. This wasn’t living; this was just getting by day-to-day. There had to be a way out of this. I had to quit. I had to stop using hammer completely.
I’d tried to quit before, and each time I’d fucked up within days; sometimes within hours or even minutes of getting out of detox. Looking up at the sky, I decided I’d try and get clean again, and this time I’d do it right.
Here I was, getting closer to forty, and still shooting up, even if it was only casually.
That’s the first mistake, believing that heroin use can be casual. Maybe a very few can manage it, but not me. I’d learnt that the hard way. I don’t believe I ever met anyone else who had managed it, either. Maybe the idea that it was possible was just an urban myth; something to use as an excuse for that extra shot.
Getting in 1983–1993
“Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.”
~ William S. Burroughs
JOE
My name is Giles, but everyone calls me Joe. I began taking drugs when I was sixteen, and only got straight in my late thirties. I was one of the lucky ones. A lot of people I knew didn’t make it through, lost in the hazy world of addiction and slow (or fast) death.
I started smoking dope before I finished High School, and progressed to amphetamines (speed or goey) fairly quickly. The majority of drug addicts are damaged goods, the ones who suffered abuse of some form and saw drugs as a way of coping with life or guilt.
I was one of the abused.
There was a teacher at primary school – I’ll call him Mr Duffy – who took great pleasure in dishing out punishment to anyone who he saw as ‘bad’. It didn’t matter to him how small the infraction, he was ready to give them the strap: a wicked leather strip studded with metal. I always seemed to find myself in trouble, always seemed to be the one caught doing something wrong.
I found myself in the office at least three times a week, being punished for something.
I was about nine years old when it began.
At first, I thought he was just taking the punishment up a notch by strapping me on the bum instead of on the hand, but then he demanded I take my pants down.
One day I was caught fighting with another boy on the footy oval.
‘Joe, get into my office,’ Mr Duffy yelled.
I walked into his office. He followed me inside.
‘Take down your pants and bend over the desk,’ he said. He took the strap out of his desk and moved over to close the curtains.
I did as he asked, shaking in terror.
Thwack. The first blow hurt more than it ever had before. I tried to push away from the desk, but he had one hand holding me by the neck as I struggled.
Thwack. I screamed in pain.
‘If you yell, I’ll hurt you even more,’ he said.
I bit back my cries. I sobbed, gulping great lungfuls of air as I tried to get away from the pain.
I’m not sure what happened next, but I felt something soft and wet. ‘What are you doing?’ I yelled, as I tried once more to turn around. He had hold of my jumper. His face was near my throbbing arse.
‘Stop it,’ I yelled. He shook me.
‘You shut up or I’ll hurt you even worse, you little bastard.’
I shut up, and he continued to lick the raised welts.
I felt his free hand move up my leg and between my thighs. He touched my penis, stroking it up and down.
I felt him stand up, and I heard him unbuckle his belt and drop his pants. He moved behind me and I felt something poking me as he took the hand away from my jumper and pushed me down flat onto the desk and raped me.
I’ll never forget the pain and shame that I felt at that moment.
When he had finished, he told me to pull up my pants and get out.
‘And don’t think of telling anyone about this,’ he said. ‘No-one will ever believe you and you’ll get into even more trouble than usual.
And so, for the next two years, I was raped at least once a week; sometimes more. He always seemed to be watching me, waiting for something he could punish me for.
I was quiet and withdrawn during these years. I was the odd one out, never really fitting in with the other kids. I was ashamed of what was happening to me, and the other kids somehow knew I had something to hide. Naturally, this singled me out for some ‘special attention’.
Being bullied leaves scars; on the surface and deep inside. I put up with it for a time before I finally cracked and fought back. I don’t know why I left it for so long, but after I put up a fight, it stopped. The bullies looked elsewhere for easier targets. Eventually, even the other abuse stopped. I think Mr Duffy found another, younger, child to abuse. But the damage had been done. I wasn’t the same person I had been before.
I had no brothers or sisters, having been adopted at six weeks by a couple who couldn’t have their own children. I found out about the adoption at 16, and have always wondered if perhaps this affected me subconsciously, due to the timing of my drug experimentation.
I never lacked for material things: I had everything I could have wanted growing up, everything except self-esteem and friends, that is.
I spent my youth in Sunshine, a working class suburb west of Melbourne filled with factories and take-away food outlets. There was nothing to do outside of school. Most days I ended up reading by myself at home, or out with the few friends I did have, breaking into factories and smashing windows. If we weren’t already in trouble, we were looking for ways to get into it.
The childhood abuse and bullying left me with a desire to learn how to fight, so I joined a local karate club. I studied there two nights a week for three years.
* * * * *
I soon found some friends, and suffered less at the hands of the bullies that had made my life hell for so many years. In year ten of high school (1982), I became good friends with a girl in the new group named Carolyn – not the same one, but I seem to have a karmic attraction to the name. We used to go roller-skating together every week, and soon enough I became a fairly good skater. Good enough to make the local roller-hockey team.
Life became better, but still I was missing something; something felt wrong, absent from my life. I had a very low self-esteem, and had no luck with girls.
I was in love with Carolyn, but I didn’t have the nerve to act on it. I figured I was no good for anyone, and that no-one would ever want to be with me.
I spent all my spare time hanging around at her place, or going out with her. We did everything a couple would do without actually being a couple.
This tore me apart inside, but I never let on how I felt about her. All I knew was that I wanted to spend as much time with her as possible. In the end, we were virtually inseparable.
Through Carolyn, who seemed to be attracted to the bad-boy type, I made a new group of friends and associates.
Smokin’ – 1983
Toward the end of high school, I was still best friends with Carolyn, still spending all my time with her. She had started dating guys, which was to be my downfall, both emotionally and physically. It really hurt to see her with someone else, holding hands or kissing in front of me. It was to lead me to something that would change my life forever.
My first experience with drugs was smoking marijuana at a party in 1983. A guy that Carolyn was seeing at the time, Steve, was the first to give it to me. I was extremely jealous of him, and what he had with Carolyn, but he was a nice guy. Even though I hated the idea of him being with her, I found it hard to hate him as a person. He was friendly and he treated me well. Carolyn and Steve invited me over to the party. I spent the first hour or so moping around, trying to ignore Steve and Carolyn holding hands.
I’d had a couple of drinks by this stage, and when I walked into the kitchen, some guys were smoking dope at the table.
‘Joe... wanna cone?’ Steve said.
‘Um... I dunno.’
‘You’ve had dope before, haven’t ya?’ he asked.
Uh... no,’ I said.
‘D’ya wanna try it?’ he asked.
To be honest, the idea scared the shit out of me, but I needed to keep up a front of being a man. Image was important to me. Really, I was so damaged inside that it was all I had.
I walked over and sat down, watching as the guy sitting next to me smoke through a strange looking pipe, a combination of a fruit juice bottle and some plastic tubing.
Steve started to roll a joint. ‘If you’ve never tried it, it’s easier on the lungs if you have a joint.’ he said.
Steve handed me the rollie. ‘This could be rough. Try not to cough.’
I tried to light it with a match, but it just smouldered.
Steve laughed. ‘You have to suck on it to get it lit.
I lit another match, holding it to the tip of the joint as I sucked. It felt like knives tore at my throat and lungs, pain followed by a terrible taste.
I coughed so hard I thought one of my lungs had punctured, pain flared down my left side.
Finally, I got my breath back, and someone handed me back the joint, which I had accidentally dropped.
‘Try and hold the smoke in your mouth, then draw it back.’ I’m not sure who said this, my eyes still filled with tears. This time I managed to keep the smoke down, only coughing again once I’d exhaled. It didn’t hurt as much, but it didn’t seem to be doing anything. I passed the joint to the next person and waited patiently for it to make its way around again.
We finished the joint but I didn’t feel any different, so I asked if I could try a pipe.
This seemed to have more of an effect. I felt tired and dizzy. Eventually I found my way into a bedroom. I recall sitting on the bed for a second to gather my thoughts. I remember very little else, just staring into nothing for what felt like a moment but in reality must have been hours. Carolyn came in and asked if I was okay. It seemed a silly question; I was fine – as fine as I could ever remember. At that moment, I realised how different I felt, how floaty and happy.
This was good. I felt alive.
I can’t remember how I got home; I think maybe Carolyn’s mum gave me a ride. All I can remember is thinking the next day just how much I wanted to get high again.
Looking back, it still makes little sense to me. I can’t be totally sure why I felt the need for drugs to make me happy. I’ve asked myself that question a million times. Maybe it was the sexual abuse and the need to suppress it. Maybe it was being adopted and never feeling close to my parents. I never came up with a definitive answer. I wish I knew then what I know now, maybe I could have told my parents what was happening instead of hiding it from everyone. I could have begun to get some counselling rather than self-medicating.
Within weeks, I was smoking dope every weekend, and soon after that it became a daily occurrence. Dope was easy to get in Sunshine. During the eighties it wasn’t policed as much as it is nowadays, if at all.
Around December of eighty-three I got to know a dealer in Wright Street who used to set up shop in his kitchen, and serve customers out of the window that faced onto the drive-way. People would line up, exchanging cash for foil-wrapped grams of dope, like a drive-thru window at McDonalds. Some nights, the line wound its way out his driveway and onto the footpath, spilling out into the real world, so to speak. Guys and girls stood around, chatting and drinking while they waited to score.
In this day and age, no-one would dare be that blatant but back then the cops either didn’t know or didn’t care. It was easier to obtain drugs than it was to get hold of alcohol. This suited my tastes perfectly. I didn’t like drinking, so I smoked instead.
I smoked the Christmas of ’83 away, and then I started on ’84.
I had begun to withdraw from my family after primary school, spending more and more time alone in my bedroom. I had a television, a stereo and a video-recorder, so I didn’t have to socialise. I don’t know why my parents didn’t push me to be more social and to sit in the lounge-room with them. I think that being adopted, we had all failed to bond the way a normal family does from birth. I know I felt worse being alone all the time, but I could get lost in my books and TV shows. It gave me an escape and it gave me the opportunity to get stoned all the time without them noticing.
I used to roll joints and go out to the street to smoke. I made sure the neighbours didn’t see, and I made sure I used cologne to mask the smell.
My parents used to go away on weekends to markets once I was old enough to look after myself. This coincided perfectly with the beginning of my descent into drugs. It gave me the freedom to indulge myself every weekend. I had a chip on my shoulder and a deep-seated anger over the abuse I’d suffered when I was younger, and the marijuana gave me a break from those unwanted feelings. I began studying judo in St. Albans to learn different fighting skills, which is where I met Chris Augustine.
Chris became a good friend. His older brother, Mark, was the instructor. Chris and I hung together most weekends and smoked dope. He was a nice guy with a heart of gold, a shitload of loyalty and a great sense of fun.
We’d scored some Lebanese Gold hashish, a stronger version of marijuana made from the oils of the plant. We mulled it up and had some bongs. Chris ran outside to the laundry to throw up, not used to the strength of the drug.
I was sitting in the lounge, listening to Dark Side of the Moon at full volume.
The intro was playing, a loud and realistic heartbeat, when suddenly the back door slammed open.
‘FUCK! I’m dying. My heart’s gonna explode!’ Chris staggered into the lounge room, a stricken look on his pale face. Eyes wide and scared as hell, he lurched over to lean against the mantelpiece.
‘What the fuck you talkin’ about?’ I asked, laughing.
‘I...I can hear my heart, it’s about to explode,’ he stammered.
‘Dude, that’s on the stereo,’ I informed him with a grin on my face.
‘Wha...?’ he asked.
‘It’s Pink Floyd, man. You know, the part with the heartbeat?’ I said.
‘Oh...yeah...I knew that,’ he replied, a relieved look on his face.
We had another pipe each and settled into listening to the album as loud as my stereo could play it.