Day 6 - February 17th

Day 6 - February 17th
First day back in Adelaide
Welcome home - Here comes the fucking storm
Spazzed out at the House of Rouse
Acid was a bad fucking choice

        I remember this day really well, I was so happy to be back home with all my friends who I'd spent the last four months missing. I went to my mate Sam's place, he was a pretty successful drug dealer at the time... Hahahaha! Fuck, even just writing the phrase “successful drug dealer” now as a 27-year old is making me laugh. Ridiculous.
        Sam's place was the meeting point for our group of mates, these were the guys I'd been hanging out with every weekend from when I started going to clubs and taking drugs at a semi-professional level, they were:

        Sam – e used to refer to him as 'Peter Pan' because he was a child at heart, and 'Dad' because he was the only one with any money. Sam and I had gone to primary school together, but lost touch through high school and only reconnected when I started working bar at Red Square ('Reds' for short), which was the nightclub we all went to every weekend. Sam had a flat close to town that he rented with drug money. We called it Neverland – like Peter Pan, “never grow up” – and the bins were always full of pizza boxes and gatorade bottles.
        Plummy – Sam's right hand man, was around the most by virtue of not having even the slightest trace of employment, and having been kicked out of his parents' house too many times to count. Stood by Sam when he slipped into a deep, horrific depression, and was there with him every day pulling him through.
        Jase – Tall and hairy, Jase was a DJ around town, he played at Reds sometimes, but often did sets at other venues and then came afterwards to party. Known to get upset while drunk and start sulkily stomping around the dancefloor until someone gave him a cigarette. Very, very funny.
        Sketch – Sketch doesn't feature in any of the stories I'm about to tell to be honest, but I think it's still super notable and illustrative to note that I had a friend at the time called Sketch. He was an idiot. We called him 'The Miracle Boy' because of his strange ability to come out of insanely adverse situations unscathed, with no concept of the fact that he was ever in danger.
        Someone: “Sketch where were you last night?”
        Sketch: “Oooooh fuck man these guys tried to rob me ay! Cornered me in the carpark, but I told 'em I didn't have anythin' on me, then one of 'em knew my Mum and shit and they gave me a lift to Maccas!”
        Everyone: “Of course they did.”
        Johnny – Perennial fuckup, a drug dealer as well, but somehow never made any money from it. Once I remember he was counting out a stack of cash on a Sunday, flashing it around all proud of himself, and a few separate people he owed money to saw and wryly started deducting their share from what he'd proclaimed he was holding. Ten minutes later we'd figured out that after he paid everyone back, Johnny's profit for the weekend sat at an impressive $25.

        There were plenty more in the cast, and over the months and years people came and went, but these guys were the core, and we were at Sam's place the most. We called ourselves The Lost Boys to fit with the Neverland theme, and every weekend we'd meet on Friday and do pre-drinks there, go to the club, and then head back to Neverland in the morning to kick on all day. I showed up in the afternoon on the 17th of February. Sam was asleep, but Plummy was awake and ready to party with me, so we took acid and sat in the living room drinking, waiting for the night to come.
        To pass the time we started writing lists of all the girls we'd ever slept with – normally I wouldn't even remember such an innocuous detail, let alone share it without prompting. It's kind of gross really, sitting there with your mate making a list of girls you've slept with to prove to each other how great you are. If it were up to me I'd have kept quiet about it forever, but as it happens the universe has conspired to reveal it by making it a part of something incredible.
        Months after this, Neverland was raided by police and Sam was arrested and tried for drug dealing. Because it was his first recorded offence, he didn't go to jail (although he did go down on the second offence a few years later), and was released on bail. After the trial, the police returned everything they'd taken from his house as evidence to use in the trial against him, including a piece of paper which he took a photo of and sent to me. On the paper was a list of names with the title “Taco's Fuck List”. The cops took the list I wrote with Plummy on the day I got back from Bolivia, they must have thought it was a coded list of drug dealers, which means that if they did their due diligence, every girl I slept with from 2007-2012 was investigated by the South Australian Police.
        What a reward for their charity.

        That first night back in Adelaide I also had the news broken to me that Grace, my ex, and part of the reason I'd gone to Bolivia in the first place, had started dating Johnny. When the news was broken to me, I mean Jonnny and Grace showed up at the house together like nothing was going on, and when I saw her everyone kind of looked at each other and went, “oooooooh....”
        Fuck that was brutal.
        I'd met Grace on Australia Day 2011 – I'd heard about her from a few people before then, she had a reputation as Wild Girl, a hurricane, wasn't worried if she slept with people's boyfriends and broke hearts. I thought she sounded fantastic.
        The day we met the party was at her house and she was wearing a straw fedora when we kissed for the first time in the doorway to that led from her kitchen to the backyard. She stared up at me when our faces touched, reached down and grabbed my entire crotch through my shorts while piercing my eyes and laughing, “I'M REALLY DRUNK!”
        I was in love.

        But she was broken, tough life is an understatement. Raped by her grandfather 98 times – she counted – from ages 12-13, and an ice addict by the time she left high school. Her and her drug dealing boyfriend bought a house together with drug money when she was 19, but she lost the house to him when he ran off with her best friend while she was doing a stint in rehab. I mean that is insanity, right?
        She told me all of these things in the first few months after we met that day in January 2011, but I was young, and had no idea how to respond to them. I thought that by telling me she was giving me the job of fixing these problems in her life, and so I set to work with an arsenal of moody song recommendations and very average poetry.
        We spoke every day, said “I love you” and all that, but whenever I tried to organize a meeting she'd tell me that she couldn't because it made her too anxious to see me. It drove me crazy for months, I couldn't understand how this girl who told me she loved me could, in the same breath, refuse to see me. The one time we tried to have sex I was so terrified of messing everything up that I couldn't get hard, and she never let me forget it. I'd ask her to meet up again because I wanted to see her and she'd say things like, “You gonna get it up this time, champion?”
        Around the time she broke off contact with me and started dating a girl called Sav who worked at the same bar as me, I decided to volunteer in Bolivia to get as far away from her as possible. Then I met Mélanie and rediscovered myself.

        When I left Bolivia, when Mélanie and I stood crying our eyes out in Cochabamba Airport on Valentine's Day 2012, she made me promise that I'd never speak to Grace again because of what she'd done to me. I never meant to see her again, but when I got back there she was, dating my friend, and hanging out in my place, with all of my people, acting like nothing had happened. I tried to look in her eyes and see the same thing that I'd seen on Australia Day the year before, but she was guarded, and she wouldn't look back.

Click here to read the next part - Day 7 - February 18th.