CHILDREN OF THE DOORWAYS

They slump in filthy doorways, the tragic kids lost to heroin.

MY LITTLE son's three, a trifle young. I should've thought, to see all
these discarded heroin needles jammed in a bin and overflowing elsewhere in
the men's lavatory adjacent to trendy Kensington railway station; som
without missing a beat, to save him from taking in such a shocking sight,
which is becoming the everyday experience of people in Melbourne these
days, I grabbed him and he did weewees everywhere, behind a simple gum tree
as it turned out.

Kensington is so pretty and graced and garlanded with every conceivable
kind of flowering gum tree, hovering butterfly and highly desirable
double-storey wrought-iron balcony. Indeed, Hal Porter the poet lived here
years ago, right in Bellair Street, the inspiration for The Watcher on the
Cast-Iron Balcony. That's before he felt up boys. God, nobody's any good!

Everywhere we go we seem to step across drugged bodies or such boozed boys
as make up nightmares for our ambiguous times. On one hand, the alcohol
manufacturers push pro-drinking ads on impressionable young kids to get
them hooked on whisky and other cowboy juices, so the children who swig
from longhorn bottles have the appearance of coolness and urbanity. On the
other hand, a fair few boozed children decline to wake up in the morning,
due to an overdose, of fashion.

Government health bodies that warn that alcohol is a real problem are
stymied in their efforts to wean kids off because of a maximum brainwash
from the advertising agencies who booze and make deals with the evil
distilleries. But we need another Prohibition like we need a hole in the
head. The Prohibition didn't do any good. And government warnings don't
either.

We don't need a better warning against drink and drugs, we need better
people. But where do they come from? How can you be better?

If you smoke you're a moron. If you drink you're a jerk.

If you shoot up you're subversive.

If you're a wowser you're a prick.

You simply cannot win.

The common everyday sight of young people off their heads on heroin, coming
down, squatting in shat-in grotty doorways, is indeed very nauseating and I
just sometimes, you know what I mean - I wonder why kids do it? Why be
drugged in the first place? Is it better than being drunk with your father
and mother? Is it a problem with fashion or insouciance? Is being drugged
acceptable?

Each doorway appears to hold the answer to my simple question. Is this
where we're supposed to stay? Living in a doorway? Whole armies of lost
ghoulish children slumped in filthy doorways like awful sculptures made of
idiocy and self-delusion and a need for power.

Kids shoot up to escape the hideous mindscape of sameness Dad's always the
same; so shoot up. Mum is too; stick it in your arm. There's peer pressure
at what passes for school, so try and see if you can score. There's nobody
to love; smoke crack. There's nobody to make you forget or laugh, so have a
try of morphine.

I see so many drugged and overdosing young children right out of it in
doorways, I need them to step into some kinder and sunnier door.

I smoked marijuana when I was young, and then John Cain got in and I gave
it away. Dope meant hash or grass when I was young and free. Now it means
something very different. I see the kids whacked out everywhere I go, and I
can't help wondering why they want to be stoned, shitfaced, completely gone
or whatever the new saying for it goes like. They look just like poor dying
lost puppies at The Lost Dogs Home in North Melbourne. The sky could cry
for them if it had the heart to do so. The kids are soon going up into the
sky, anyway.

In Racecourse Road, near where we live, I can always smell the off
fragrance of marijuana in the morning as the feverish cut-price Jack
Brabhams wheelie off to work. It floats among many other uppers and downers
mixed into leaded and unleaded petrol; it floats like a heartless stigma
among trace elements of flakes of car body duco, bits of invisible hair and
particles of optic fibre we all must breathe.

Do kids get into binge-drinking to imitate their gutless parents? Or do
they binge-drink because they're bored stupid with their binge-drinking
parents?

I never had a beer until I was 20. I drank Pura milk for 20 years, then one
day at work, which was Southdown Press, a large printing and publishing
house in West Melbourne, it was the astonishing shock of being fired along
with two entire floors of honest workers that led me to my first jug, and
I've never looked back since. I loved it. It's so comforting. But is it?

The drink, I thought, gave mercy to the dash for the dole, it understood
me, it liked me. The sacked guillotine operators and sales reps didn't need
much persuasion to drink with each other; they all knew what grog was
invented for. It was invented so men and women could laugh without
thinking. It was invented so you could bear one another. Or put up with
management.

My mother wept when I rolled home pissed the first time. I did too, because
there wasn't a drop in the house, and I had the taste for it.

But, of course, alcohol offers only the illusion of camaraderie. It dumps
you, it takes much more than it niggardly offers. It's a depressive. "I
drink because I'm under terrific pressure!" is the common pisspot's
utterance. People drink because they're weak.

I GUESS the only thing that's any good about alcohol is that eventually you
tend to sober up - that is if your liver hasn't packed it in, or your
kidneys still work a bit.

Drinking doesn't make men funny; that's another myth that isn't true. Men
who drink all the time are morose, boring, lazy and spend their days
insulting Eritrean taxi drivers who are only doing their level best to work
out where Armadale is.

Drinking is a fine thing to do with your life, so long as it doesn't
eclipse your life. Bob Hawke gave drink away when he confessed that, he
started looking forward to it at morning tea, and that it began losing him
any focus. I think he's still on the wagon. Or is he simply nicer because
of Blanche?

Is drinking for people too chicken, as junkies claim, to get onto the right
stuff, like smack? But how many times has smack backfired? Do real men -
really inject heroin into their legs or arms in front of their children,
when they are hanging out?

Shooting galleries appear to work in Sweden, but the Melbourne City Council
won't have a bar of them even though there are councillors very keen on
giving them a go. On my way to the milk bar of a morning, the first sound I
ever hear is a bloody pipette cracking under the weight of my innocent toes
on the sweet and unminding jade-green naturestrip. I tread on chucked-out
condoms and heroin needles the way I used to trip over toadstools and
colored pencils on my way to school.

I see the trees having a word,with each other on my way home with the milk
and the paper. I see the old people having a go at getting the mower going,
muttering darkly about the cost of living. I see the malted-milk clouds
tumbling over the innocent chimneys of people's homes. Inside them our
ordinary citizens are trying to keep warm. They are chopping up celery for
the kid's soup. They are fretting about paying bills. They are doing their
best, and they are idiots in junkie's eyes. Decent and kind people are
ridiculous beneath a junkie's slumped contempt.

I can't get used to seeing kids slumped in doorways with their heads in
their hands. I can't grow familiar with the nauseating sight of children
(for such they are; they are nowhere grown-up; I want to give them a kick
of the footy) overdosing, with their eyes rolling away on the footpath.
With stretcher-bearers trying to pump and prime and hit them back to life,
only to see the same doomed kids at it again a few days or nights later.
Pole-axed. Stiffs. Dead.

Heroin isn't from Hollywood. It's not sophisticated to shoot it up into
your poor young meagre body. To have it take everything and destroy the old
family. All over Melbourne, in my mind's eye, I can see young kids doing
it, shooting it up. I want to play cricket with them. I wonder if they'd go
to the Spring Racing Carnival with me? I don't suppose it's very likely,
the way things are.

Underneath Ascot Vale railway station, in the old dank tunnel, they are
sitting as dead as doornails. These kids should be putting on cricket pads,
or making a billy-can for the younger ones up the road. But that's bullshit
these days. That's in a Ginger Meggs comic.

In the middle of the day in Racecourse Road, Newmarket - this was only a
couple of weeks ago - I watched as some bored cops picked up a bumbling
drunken junkie who tried in his groggy fashion to stick up the Cambodian
chemist shop with a light-green water pistol. Three or four cops got there
in nothing-flat. In fact it was a bit of an over-reaction, all things
considered, you'd have to say. The cops were armed and I suppose it was
shoot-to-kill, what with heroin trafficking the way it is.

He looked rather sheepish and rather sweet as he shamefacedly got into the
van. The cops screamed at him. He wasn't in a hurry.

In my dreams I keep seeing and revisiting the overdosed ones, pale grisly
faces so freaked out on the incredible killing power of too-pure-heroin.
Schoolchildren slumped in all those nightmare shop doorways, I think of all
their potential. Maybe they could write? Write back from Heaven to tell us
what it feels like to leave mum and pop so heartbroken and lonely?

Oh, well, it's not their fault, is it? You're only young once. Or is that
dead once?

Checked-by: Joel W. Johnson