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1. dirty money talks dirty
He threw the money onto the brown glass coffee table. I was poor but I said, 'I don't want it'. He shrugged, smiling with that hard-cut boyish look. I was standing beside a wall of blue coats. As far as gangsters went, they were worlds apart. They could have lived in Atlantis. I shuffled about uneasily, trying to conceal the enormous growl in my guts. I said, 'I don't need your dirty money'. But he knew that I wanted it. I could smell the brassy cleanness in the bundle of new notes. So I quickly made the compromise, as I snatched it from the coffee table. I said, 'I'm going to give this to The Coalition Against Duck Shooting'. 'Good,' he shrugged in his big square suit. He wore his suit as big as a building, his even larger diamonds unfolding along his fingers. They were the same diamonds that he placed inside his pockets for court, to keep his appearance modest. 'Good,' he said. 'I like ducks.' I learnt that one of them could fill a loungeroom like a dozen. They spoke out of the corners of their mouths, and there was a place there where the cigarettes hung. Their lips were disciplined, in perfect balance with the rest of their facial expressions. Tongues and teeth worked in harmony with rising smoke. The burning tobacco was deeply involved in its own creative process, as it floated up from their words. Their speech was hearty and stylised, as if they were from Chicago or New York, hanging out in underground gambling houses with hard-faced whores, or ducking from machine gun fire behind the open doors of big black cars, or saying, 'Hey bud, spst spst bud'. But they were all big fish in the small pond of Melbourne, Australia. Meanwhile, my mind built its stories to the height of The Sears Tower. These were Australian gangsters, clean-cut and more innocent than the ones from North America. Compared to the United States of the Apocalypse, this roomful was like a kindergarten playground. Frazer said to me, 'They're thugs. They're not proper gangsters. They're fuckwits. They brag down at the pubs pulling their guns out. It's all for the big show.' He added, 'The real gangsters kiss you on the mouth, and then it's all over. You don't know when it's fucking coming. This lot put their mates in, spend their lives in and out of prison.' Frazer turned on the others when he was half-drunk. But I knew some who hadn't been caught. People thought that gangsters were bad. I think that they are as self-interested as anybody else. They are individually ruined, dangerous and generally lawless. But in fact, they do less damage to the society than your average consumer. The gangster knocks out the opposition for power. The consumer kills the earth with greed. The gangster kills with the style that Hollywood has created. The consumer would be the gangster the minute they had the guts. The consumer consumes gangsters like products. There exists this Disney World atmosphere of comedy that gangsters are now able to kill in. Society makes it easy for them. It offers up its goods like a limo without an alarm. When the gangsters accept the gift they are punished. That's if they get caught. If they don't get caught they make a movie out of it. It's all a set-up. The existence of banks and jewellery shops are for pleasure and greed. Much like a MacDonald's atmosphere for the overweight hamburger-eater, or the mega-mall atmosphere for the money-drunk consumer. I thought, at least gangsters have some cunning intelligence, some style about them. As for me, I was young and hardly entered into their fantastic world. My involvement was like shyly tiptoeing into the tepid edge of a great lake. I soon found out that the further in towards the centre of the lake I went the colder it got. The lake had the humid character of a mirage that surrounded the psyche, making the world outside it unclear. Its mist made the people that moved within that faraway world expendable and irrelevant. In fact the lake wasn't good for swimming in at all. It was cold and then it was hot and then it was cold again. Every promise came with a high price, from the mouths of those who had played the game, long before I had been born. Underneath, somewhere at the lake's centre, at its crystal stylish heart, was the ice. The ice at the centre of the world. Their world could savage and burn into the heart, like solid ice placed against an open wound. Some of the people they bumped off had their cocks cut out and stuffed into their mouths. The dead white cheeks were swelling with their own body parts. Then they were thrown out of the planes. Nigel's own brother slid down a wall in an abandoned apartment. He left a trail of blood flowing from the back of his collar and suit. He shouted out into the dark, 'Why are you doing this to me?' As if he were asking the world the same question in his agony. He was found standing against the wall, dead. I imagined his face, as innocence dragged down, something that we could all feel responsible for. To lose a brother or a sister, why one lived and the other died, was the greatest mystery. If not at birth, then at the hands of a society that gobbled them up. It was like all those ogres and monsters from fairy tales and legends, who promised to do us in when we were children. Some of us had even escaped them. I imagined death for him, as simultaneous thoughts. His life now experienced in slow seconds, with maybe some love or surrender thrown in. I imagined him letting go as he told himself to hold on. He was an unknown young man, who lived in a prison of life. He left behind his brothers and his mother, to desire his presence and to instead hold emptiness. It was two guys with the knives who left the room, as weak as shadows in the dark. Now those two guys are also dead. |
