Day 27 - June 30th

Day 27 - June 30th
I'm going to Melbourne fuck this
Oh god why did I sleep with that girl?
Drunk Taco fuck you
This job is fucking terrible

        I was at my breaking point with Adelaide. I'd gotten rid of my blonde/orange fringe in the hopes that employment would be more forthcoming, but almost six months after coming back from Bolivia I'd still not been able to find any decent work. The one source of semi-regular income I'd managed to secure in that time was from my friend, Sam.

        Sam knew that I was in a shitty spot with money, and he knew that I'd had a stint working as a residential cleaner in 2011, so he employed me to clean Neverland (that was what we called his house, if you remember from before?). He paid me a very generous $25 an hour under the pretence that he did in fact need it cleaned every week, but wasn't willing to have some random from a cleaning agency come into the house and start snooping around his drug empire. I cleaned up once a week, making a two-hour job out of doing the dishes, cleaning up cigarette packets and fast food bags, and collecting the countless Gatorade bottles he went through – apparently the electrolytes in Gatorade help to stave-off the dry-mouth you get from smoking ice all of the time – TIP FROM THE TOP!
        Most of all though I remember the NOS canisters.

        Most drug addicts who manage to secure a reliable income to feed their habit end up settling on meth or heroin, but Sam, always the mould-breaking contrarian, instead devoted $2000 a week to inhaling nossies (in Melbourne they call Nitrous Oxide cannisters 'nangs', but in Adelaide we on our own shit, bruh). Eventually the presence of vast amounts of nitrogen in his blood led to him being hospitalised as he became unable to feel or move his extremities. When the doctors found out how many of the tiny metal cannisters he'd been inhaling through whipped cream dispensers every day, they wrote a paper on his anomalous case.
        I never really connected in my head just how much trouble my friend would eventually find himself in if he continued down the path he was on. Like, I did to some extent, but I also accepted that even if I tried, there would be no stopping him. Instead, I settled for a sort of morbid pride every time I got down on all fours and swept out the hundreds of spent canisters from under his bed with a broom-stick. They clinked and jangled like sea shells under the surging tide, and I put them in bin bags with everything else I collected, and chucked them in the back of my parents' station wagon.
        Sam didn't want the masses of rubbish generated by our ravenous consumption within his drug-den appearing on the sidewalk every week and arousing the suspicion of his neighbours. To avoid this, the final part of my duties as cleaner was to drive around at night, usually accompanied by Plummy, and dump the rubbish covertly in other parts of the neighbourhood. We travelled far and wide to commercial bins, hard rubbish collections, the skip behind the gym – anywhere we could think of to throw out garbage bags full of party refuse under cover of darkness. He told us to be careful, and we were, but not careful enough evidently, because one week Sam received a fine in the mail for illegal dumping of rubbish in a building site. We never thought to remove his mail from the rubbish we threw out, so when they found the trash there they had the name and address handy to send the fine straight back to.
        He didn't make me pay it. I don't know how I would have if he had done, but he didn't. He just called me stupid, and told me not to let it happen again.

        Towards the end of June I'd found an ad online for a job that had something to do with electricity. I went for an interview and quickly found myself working in a sales office, going door-to-door five days a week trying to convince people to change their electricity provider.
        The way door-to-door sales works is you show up in the morning for a pep talk in the office, then you all jump in cars and drive out to the area of town where all the poor people live, as conventional sales-wisdom states that rich people are bad targets for door-to-door sales. When you get out there you have to knock on as many doors as possible, and when someone answers, you get to ruin their day – that is unless they don't tell you to fuck off and instead invite you into their home. If they invite you in, then your job is to try and convince them that they should buy whatever it is you're selling, regardless of whether they need it or not, and then you make commission off of those sales. At the end of the week if you've convinced enough poor people to let you steal money off them, then the boss of the office says, “Well done, you're a great sales-person! You get to ring this bell!” – a little known fact about most sales offices is that there's a bell that you get to ring if you're the best sales person for the week. So you ring the bell, and everyone stands around you chanting “YAAAAAAY!! STEALING! STEALING! STEALING!” in guttural shreiks while frothing from their mouths. The ceremony is complete.
        The people who worked with me at this job were mostly pretty cool – we were a ragged bunch of losers trying desperately to trick ourselves into thinking we weren't doing something awful. I couldn't do it, and most of the others weren't much good either. The boss was this slimy little worm of a man called Nathan, he was tall – probably over six foot – and he wore a suit and spoke confidently, but he had an air of shivering desperation that made the air thicken whenever he shuddered into a room. His short, red hair was the only thing halting physical comparisons with a vulture. I hated him.
        On my last day a bunch of us met up in a cafe and snorted Adderall – someone in the team had ADD and was excited about sharing their legal speed with everyone. When we went back into The Field (as in back to knocking doors, not a literal field) it was cold and rainy. I tried to keep my spirits up by singing The A Team by Ed Sheeran, which Sam had just introduced me to. I couldn't stop from clenching my jaw from the Adderall, and every time a person appeared at their door I dropped my shoulders before repeating Nathan's sales script through gritted teeth while behind my eyes I begged the person I was talking at to close their door so I could get back to my singing. I must have appeared a terrifying spectre of a person to anyone whose doorstep I sullied that day.
        That weekend (June 30th was a Saturday), a bunch of the sales team went round to someone's house and got silly drunk. I ended up sleeping with my my team leader, who was a girl my age, and was actually pretty cool I don't know why I was beating myself up about it so badly when I wrote on the card. We all felt like we were really in something together in that job. The night we slept together, she told me she had plans to move to Melbourne at the same time as me, and we even discussed getting a house together (as friends) when she finally made it over there. For some reason I used her address in Adelaide to receive mail for about three months after I moved to Melbourne. There was no reason I couldn't use my parents' address, but I think changing that address was some sort of preliminary attempt of cutting the cord that tied me to home, like smashing all the plates in the kitchen to prove to everyone that you've started cleaning.
        “I'M DOING IT! LOOK, I'VE ALREADY STARTED!!”

        My last shift only became my last shift when I decided in the middle of the day that I'd had enough. I called Nathan from The Field to tell him, and he sped out to wherever the fuck we were and picked me up straight away. I said sorry for letting him down and tried to make small-talk on the drive back, but he was distant, already busy doing damage control in his mind. He had to make sure this one bad apple didn't spoil his bunch – his carefully curated team of ruthless sales sharks that unbeknownst to him were at that very moment wandering separately around some outer suburb of Adelaide, high on Adderall, chewing their lips in the rain.
        I never saw any of them again. Click here to read the next part - Day 28 - July 3