After four days going hard on the media campaign, blitzing the airwaves and papers and going to fucking Parliament House twice, I’m fucking overloaded – drained out.
Once I have achieved what we had to do and the initial straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth public awareness mission is complete, it’s time to let it settle and let things take their course.
So I say, ‘Listen fellas, I’ve gotta go but I’ll come back in a couple of weeks, time to allow the momentum to gain – catching up with academics, professors, this and that, community groups, victims of crime, and all this sort of stuff.’
I’m planning to head to Melbourne to meet a juvenile justice worker from Turana. We’ve had lengthy discussions about making a pilot program together to scare the young boys straight with firsthand accounts of the perils of crime. He’d even presented his superiors at Turana with a paper on it. I would be unpaid and we’d both supervise it.
But word comes that it’s rejected by head office. Apparently, I’m unsuitable for such programs. I’m gutted.
What the fuck. How worthless am I?
*
Man, I don’t know what to do; I’m overwhelmed. I just hide behind a haze of pot, except when I pop up through it with the aid of an eggie. And then come down and keep on smoking.
Society and me are at odds. I don’t fit in it. I don’t in jail, either. Nowhere.
*
Time for R&R. I haven’t even caught up with a sheila – that’s the first thing a bloke wants to do: get out there and have a fuck!
Some mates are staying at the Gold Coast and tell me to get up there so with the campaign finished I decide to head north.
I’m met at the airport and they take me back to all the fucking strippers, you know, especially at Hollywood, because they have friends there, they know people there – these are underworld figures, too, you know, and they have a little bit of influence.
What happens is I haven’t seen pussy in thirteen years – except for half an hour with a prostitute in the Cross when the media blitz was winding up. Now I’m seeing that much skin and flesh of naked women, I am overloaded. I am just overloaded. Every sheila, every worker, every girl that was there, me mates make sure: ‘Here, we’ll just pay you this – take him in for half an hour.’
I’ve got so much pussy in me face it’s like, what the fuck? By the end of it I can’t even get a fat I am so overloaded with pussy, you know. Some of them two or three times. They are going out of their way for me, you know: ‘You’re with us, you’re part of our crew. We’ll look after you, you haven’t seen pussy.’ Bang! Overloaded!
My group of mates have a timeshare penthouse apartment. They’re heading back to Melbourne but they leave me the pad to stay in for a bit. I can just kick back and relax in the sun and catch up on life. The extended group gives me a large stack of cash donations to help me out and get me on my feet. So from the shithole of Goulburn, now I have free accommodation across from the beach, the weather is great, there’s cash in my pocket: life is good.
I ring up a sheila friend of mine. I say, ‘Listen, you got any girlfriends?’
She goes, ‘Yeah, Kylie. You’d like her. She’s a bit of a wild party girl and she’d be up for it – she’d love you.’
I say, ‘Yeah, really? I’m not after a relationship.’
She goes, ‘Nah, she’s sweet for that, you know.’
The sheila takes my mobile number to pass on to her friend.
Kylie calls soon afterwards; it turns out she’s living in a penthouse apartment not even 50 metres from where I’m staying. Four of ’em, they rent out a penthouse in Broadbeach for twelve months, spend three months each on the rent or whatever. It is cheaper for them than a motel and they have more privacy. And she’s working doing cleaning in a couple of the units.
She knows I’ve just got out from jail after serving thirteen years but this doesn’t scare her off at all. It excites her.
She’s rapt because she comes from a criminal dynasty – I’m like a trophy to her. She wants to impress: ‘Oh, you’ve got to meet my mum.’ Because her mum was a gangster moll in her day, too. Still is. Kylie’s stepdad was Laurie Prendergast, one of the Great Bookie Robbery crew from 1976. He disappeared in 1985, presumed murdered and probably put through meat processing to turn him into pig food. But anyway, Kylie’s excited by me.
I take her out to dinner, have a bottle of wine; we return to the apartment and go to my room to smoke some joints. She wants to go to the beach for sex instead of doing it in the room, so we walk down and she’s talking about the underworld in Victoria, big-noting herself like it somehow matters in gaining my acceptance.
But then under the stars on that beach I’m fucking her, you know? And that’s all it is. I say to her, ‘Look, I’m not after relationships or anything like that.’
She says, ‘Yeah, I’m fine with that.’
We spend about two weeks, you know, and she’s not much to look at – I’ll be the first to tell you – but she is warm, woman and wet. And she’s willing. I have a joint, a glass of wine or an E or something and I just close my eyes while she’s sucking my dick. It’s nothing serious, you know?
After two weeks I leave, go back to Victoria and catch up with friends and family and all that sort of stuff and then it’s back to Sydney and then back up to Surfers where I catch up with her again.
And where she deliberately falls pregnant.
She deliberately falls pregnant because she wants to be a permanent fixture in my life. That’s what she tells me, and that’s what her mum tells me.
All the time I say to her, ‘I’m not ready for this, I don’t know where my life is at this point in time. I’ve got to get grounded first myself.’
It puts so much pressure on me. I don’t want to be a father yet. I’m not ready for it. I’m not even in a relationship with her – what the fuck? If you’re going to have a child you’re going to have a child with someone you love, someone you’re committed to, that you want to be with, that you’re living under the same roof together – not just a party moll.
She’s clucky; she really wants a kid and for her it’s the genes: me. To have a child born from me. She knows that I haven’t had any other kids and she wants to be the one that basically has the trophy: ‘I have his child.’ Because of the criminal fucking underworld fucking ideality that she got brought up in. I have a reputation – I’m crazy – which a lot of people respect!
So: ‘I’ve got his child.’ And that’s how she parades herself.
I say to her: ‘Listen, we’re not in a relationship. I’ll be the best father I can but I have my own independence. I’m a bachelor, okay? I’ll try to be the best, but I don’t come with the kid.’
She knows – I never hide it – that I’m seeing five different sheilas at the time. I am fucking them. No word of a lie: when I say I’m catching up, I’m catching up, mate. I’m a playboy, a player, and I never hide them.
One is a lesbian and I get her back on track, then I have the bi ones – whatever craving I have for the day I catch up with that sheila, you know. If some of them just love arse I’ll catch up with that one for the day. Or I’ll catch up with two or three on the same day. It just depends how I am going.
There’s a following, man. If you’ve got a bit of a reputation they all thrive on it. Tattoos, bald heads, stuff like that – it excites ’em. They like that naughty thing, you know. I don’t know why but they’re drawn to that.
But I never hide the fact, and they all know that they’re not the only ones: ‘Listen, we’re buddies. If you’re not comfortable with that – listen, I see other people and I encourage you, if you want to see other people, mate, please don’t let me hold you back. Don’t think that I’m exclusively yours or you’re exclusively mine; it’s not like that – no.’
While Kylie’s pregnant she’s living in Queensland. She comes back down for a little bit and tries to spend more time with me but she realises I’m not interested.