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| Sydney's notorious Kings Cross. |
December 1989 and it was last Saturday before Christmas when they found Jason’s body in the bathtub inside a cheap motel room in Sydney.
According to the local tabloid he checked into the motel on Parramatta Road the night before, injected himself all the bought-heroin, filled the tub to the rim, got in, and cut both wrists with a disposable razor blade. When the motel people found him the water was all blood red and he was stone cold dead.
Jason was a 22 year old Australian of English descent originally from a small country town of Waga Waga about 700 kilometres south-west of Sydney. He was my former workmate and my only dear friend in the whole wide Australia. He was not that tall, but broad, pale, and skinny built with slight curls of blonde hair on his head.
With a dimple on his left cheek he had an almost innocent look when he smiled but he frequently showed his disturbed-side when he was annoyed or angry. He came from a broken family and sometimes he jokingly claimed he was abused both physically and sexually.
We were working together as lowly servicemen for the service centre of a major European car-dealership in a posh north-shore suburb of Sydney. Every weekday from 8 to 4 we put the expensive cars up the hydraulic-hoists, change the oils and replace the filters, re-inflate and re-balance the wheels, rotate the tyres, replace the worn brake-pads, and wash and polish the cars as the final touch after other mechanics have done the tune-ups and other jobs on the cars. Easy job and money was not that bad. At least three hundred bucks a week in the pocket with regular overtimes. A bit more than the minimum wage then.
Provisional Mechanic
Since the day I landed in Sydney I knew things were going to be tough as the whole country was in a severe recession. For nearly three months I tried to find a proper engineering job through the newspapers’ job advertisements.
I had no money and I was basically surviving on the fortnightly dole of 240 dollars and it was only just enough to pay the rent. So I decided to take any job and one day I went to the local CES(Commonwealth Employment Services) office and asked for an interview. It turned out to be my lucky day.
The middle-aged female government official quickly read my resume and simply said my mechanical engineering degree from Burma was not acknowledged here as a degree after referring her thick handbook of Educational Qualifications for Migrants.
According to the Australian government my 6 years degree was only equivalent to a 2 years technical high school diploma here. I was bloody lucky the same bloody government issued me a permanent resident visa as a skilled-migrant based on the same bloody degree from Burma.
She then looked into her computer and said there were some jobs for a mechanical-minded person and asked if I could work on cars as I claimed to be a mechanical engineer. I said yes and she then called the company and then wrote down the address for me to go for an interview and wished me good luck.
So the manager sent me to the MVRIC (Motor Vehicle Repair Industry Council) office and they issued me the Provisional Mechanic Licence for a year with an attached condition that I must pass a certain mechanic test to gain a real mechanic license. That’s how I got my first grand job in Australia. A provisional mechanic cum serviceman.
Sydney then was very different from the Sydney now. Immigration was not that high and there were not that many Asians or middle-eastern people in Sydney like now. The inner western suburb of Ashfield where I lived then was still a white suburb, not yet the second Chinatown of Sydney.
I was the only Asian in our big workshop and there were a couple of Lebanese servicemen who were always derogatorily called camel drivers. Most people could not pronounce my first name and whenever they saw me eating rice they accused me of eating maggots and pretended to spew all over me in the lunch room.
Heroin Addict
From the beginning Jason was always nice to me and he explained me things or two about Australians and taught me the useful slangs like Fair-Dinkum and Fagget and Fuck-Off. I helped him to write the service sheets as he was basically illiterate and didn’t even know how to spell mechanic-related words like Diesel Engine and Reciprocating.
Whenever I wrote some words down for him he always cheerfully said I was a good speller. But I could still sense the basic disbelieve in his pale blue eyes that I an Asian immigrant could write better English than him a true blue Aussie. But he always came to me instead of others as if he didn’t want the Aussie mob to know he had difficulties in the writing department.
He drove a beat-up Datsun 120 Y and regularly gave me a lift to the Town Hall Station in the city on his way to Kings Cross, the notorious red light district of Sydney. I had no car in Sydney for almost six months as I needed to get a driver license first.
At first I didn’t know the purpose of his frequent trips to the Cross. Sometimes once or twice a week especially on our pay-day, Thursdays. Then one afternoon after work he asked me to come along to the Cross as he wanted me to buy 10 dollars worth of gas for his car after his business there as he was short of cash then. I agreed and we drove to the Cross first.
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| Kings Cross in Sydney. |
On the way to the Servo by the Woolloomooloo Wharf he suddenly asked me if I’ve ever been to the notorious Golden Triangle. He knew I was from Burma but he never said anything even remote about heroin before. But that afternoon he confessed his stupid addiction and all the problems he was having then. He even showed me the small foiled-packet of dirty heroin he’d just bought from the Cross.
Two hundred dollars worth of shit but just enough for only four hits he said. It was so dirty looking it rather looked like a little lump of brown palm-sugar powder than a fluffy white powder I heard about so many times back home. They cut the heroin with some powders and made it look so dirty he said. You spend all your pay on this shit, what you live on for the rest of the week I asked. I don’t eat that much and I live in a tiny hostel room he answered and it depressed me. That’s why he was so skinny and always dreamy I guessed.
Once I knew his desperate situation I tried to avoid him in the workshop and stop accepting the rides as I really hated the addicts. And he immediately noticed my disgust. But he still came to me often as if he badly needed a friend. Then one day he got into a real shitty trouble at the workshop.
Five Dollar Theft
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| Kings Cross Subway Station. |
The two were plain-cloth policemen as I could see the guns on their belts as they ran. They started searching the pockets of Jason’s overall and appeared to find something. The two detectives then led Jason back into the office and later they put him into the back of a police paddy-wagon and took him away. We were shocked but I simply assumed it might be a drug-related arrest. It was not. I found out later in the lunch-room.
The workshop-manager came in and told us the whole pathetic story. Small money and some valuables like expensive sunglasses from the serviced vehicles had been reported missing far too many times and finally the management had decided to call the police. Cops then did a thorough job planting a five-dollar-note a few times in the cars and checking the notes after a mechanic or serviceman had done a job on the car. And they found the notes always missing after Jason but no one else.
So today they planted a marked fiver in the glove-box of that sedan and watched and checked as the car had progressed through various mechanics and servicemen including me. After Jason the manager checked it again and found the note missing. So he signalled the waiting detectives and they searched Jason’s overall pockets and found the marked five-dollar note.
They charged him with petty-theft and put him in the Silverwater remand jail. He had no one and also no money to post the bail. After more than six months his case came to a court and the sympathetic magistrate sentenced him six months exact for stealing a fiver from a car, and he was immediately released as he had been inside that long.
While he was languishing in the Silverwater jail I tried to look for him in the Cross once as I didn’t know he was still in jail and I was missing my only friend here. There I ran into another addict, a pretty young girl with curly blonde hair and pale blue eyes, just like Jason.
Addict Prostitute
I was just sauntering aimless on the kerbs of the Darlinghurst Road vaguely hoping to see Jason among the crowd when I saw the cops trying to subdue a couple of young disorderly drunks near the Subway Station.
As I stood there holding a Foster stubby in one hand and watching the cops and the drunks, the aggressive copper woman with extendable truncheon in one hand rudely ordered me to move on. Instead of moving on I just backed away a couple of steps just to please her. And there I stepped on the feet of a young woman. Sorry, I turned round and apologized and there she was. A pretty Aussie girl smiling at me.
She might be only 19 or even 18, with her short blonde curls and pale blue eyes she immediately reminded me of Jason. No worries, she said. What she whispered after surprised me though. Are you looking for good time, big boy? Not really, why do you ask?
It will cost you 70 bucks, I have a place nearby she said. She astounded me. She was pretty and tall and curvy but too skinny for my liking and I wasn’t really after the paid-sex. But I was slightly drunk and I was suddenly horny and I never had had sex with a white woman before.
She had a tight jean and a white T-shirt with no bra underneath. And I could see her nipples through at close-up and they made me excited. I have only 50 bucks, I tried to haggle. Fine, just follow me, she said and turned round and walked towards the Station entrance.
She stopped at the landing and asked me to give 20 bucks to the old man standing guard in dark there. For the room, mate, she said. I doled out a twenty note and she continued upstairs. She turned left into the corridor and pushed open the first door. The tiny windowless room was well lit and a double bed nearly filled the room and the linen was dirty.
She took off the T-shirt and asked me the fifty. I handed her the note and she immediately left the room topless with her perky round breasts exposed. Take off your clothes, she said on the way out. I took off sneakers and my jeans and underpants but kept the flannel on. It took her more than half an hour to come back in and the long wait made me anxious and worry.
She smiled wearily at me and immediately laid her back down on the dirty bed dangling her legs from the edge. Her eyes were well closed when she told me to take off her jeans and do whatever I like. I almost undid the top buttons of her jeans. But then I saw the needle marks on the inside of her left forearm. There were so many and the last and most recent one still had a drop of blood oozing. It disgusted me.
Here I with my dick hanging out and she was almost asleep with a dreamy look on her pale young face. She just had a hit of heroin and my fifty dollars was just enough for the shit. She was now drifting on the heroin-induced clouds and letting a complete stranger do whatever he wants on her. She was selling her young body dirt cheap to any John or Jamal or Jiang on the streets of dangerous Cross so that she could just inject that 50 bucks worth of dirty shit originated from the jungles of my Burma into her veins every single day.
Disgusted, I put my jeans and sneakers back on and left the room.
A week later on Friday just-released Jason showed up at the workshop to pick up his last pay-envelope. He came into the lunchroom and chatted to us for a while before the Manager came in and asked him to leave and never to come back here. On his way out he jokingly yelled back to our good-byes. Me a fag now with HIV, I got raped inside! And we laughed.
That night he checked into the motel on Parramatta Road and next day he was found dead.
The Scourge of Burma - Part 1
The Scourge of Burma - Part 4
