DRUGS

“If I wasn’t sick, this would be a great holiday.”

Adam was always dying. He called once to say he had pancreatic cancer, although it turned out to be a scare. His prognosis improved little either way. In the last years of his life he was in hospital every other month. Drugs wore away at each part of him. The stents in his ducts failed frequently, flooding his body with bile, washing him an awful yellow. “I look like an A-rab,” he would say, coming down hard on the first syllable. “A fucking A-rab.”

But Adam enjoyed hospitals. He was healthiest when he was sick. A call would come from the ward at the Nepean, praising the food and asking for cigarettes. Stuyvesant Red, soft pack. Other friends would courier in heroin for him. “I’m in hospital,” he would joke, “and I still have to look after my own fucking pain relief.”

In reality, hospitals gave Adam what he craved most: the sense somebody cared. “I actually really enjoy hospital. They actually care for you, and it’s really rather nice. It’s great, actually. I draw and I think about my own mortality. I’m not here for long, but I’m certainly going to get my kicks until the whole fucking treehouse burns up in flames.”

*

David Attenborough’s The Life of Mammals is playing on a television. It is the monkey episode, about forming social groups. A baby in a highchair sits in front of the screen. From the toys on the floor it is clear there is a toddler somewhere too. Adam is expecting his dealer to open the door, but it is his dealer’s wife who answers. He kisses her on the cheek and walks into the kitchen. Torn books and tied bags of garbage are piled up in the corners of the house. The couch is lost beneath unfolded laundry.

Adam’s dealer takes him upstairs. The heroin he is here for is stuffed into the cut-off corners of shopping bags, twisted at the top to make little pouches. Adam undoes one and with a shaking hand coaxes the yellowish rocks into a spoon. He carries his syringes and cotton buds and saline capsules and teaspoon in an old wooden box that once held Winsor & Newton watercolours. A tourniquet he stole from his last hospital stay is fetched from his jacket pocket.

The dealer fixes himself a taste as Adam dissolves the smack over the heat of his lighter. Downstairs, the baby is crying. Oil floats to the top of the heroin. “Sorry about that,” the dealer says. “It’s from Guam.”

Adam rolls up his sleeve and ties off. His jacket arms are never buttoned. He draws up the hit through an ear of cotton wool and hunts his forearm for a vein. “I always liked a challenge,” he says. The truth is his major veins are useless – collapsed after years of injecting. Adam misses twice, but on the third attempt he hits something and watches as a whisper of blood enters the syringe’s chamber and mingles with the yellow junk. “I never did anything the easy way.”

A taxi is waiting outside, having driven Adam from Wentworth Falls to the housing estate on Sydney’s western fringe. As soon as he is inside the car, he lights a cigarette. Adam only travels with drivers who will let him smoke. “It’s about getting lost,” he is saying as the smack kicks in. “Lost in jazz, lost in heroin, just being free …”

By the time the taxi finds the freeway, Adam is on the nod. His cigarette falls from his fingers and burns a small hole in the denim jacket he is wearing. The driver waits until the McDonald’s at Blaxland to prod him awake. Adam orders a coffee: white with three sugars. This is a familiar trip and the driver follows it to order. All up, it takes about three hours. Adam picks up the conversation as if he had never been asleep: “I own a gun, I take drugs, I’m fucking free – just free, free, free.”

Taxi drivers fight for Adam’s fare. It is a $300 wait-and-return, and he takes the ride three times a week.

*

Adam started smoking marijuana when he was fourteen but graduated to speed as soon as he made it off the Northern Beaches. That was six months into art school. “I used to shoot the fucking speed and it was awful,” he said. “That shit was toxic, it was really fucking toxic.” Not that the marijuana stopped. He was living in Annandale with a man whose parents had a farm outside Lismore: the supply was too attractive. “He’d bring down a garbage bag of dope he called Water Hen. It grew on the edge of a swamp. One toke and you’d be fucked. It made him very popular with me for about two years.”

Adam used heroin for the first time at twenty-one, in the toilets of the Marlborough Hotel in Newtown. It was a defining evening – a “little taste from a little Mick”. He never really stopped. “I started taking heroin when I was trying to get off speed. I was into uppers and I could handle the uppers, but I had to go down somehow. Go down, just go down.”

*

In June 2008 Adam announces he is quitting. This happens periodically. He has watched Andrew Denton interviewing Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, the 99-year-old matriarch of the News Corp media dynasty, and decided he wants to live as long as she did. “She is the most beautiful old girl I’ve seen. It gave me an epiphany,” he says in a car outside the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where he has been signing books. “I’ve been to rehab about four times, but it never really works. I just don’t want to end up in some fucking old man’s home like Max did.”

Adam’s second cousin, the actor Max Cullen, had been in Ireland when he found himself in a doss house, wet with drink, fleeing a broken marriage and a long affair and another short one. Adam had met Max for the first time the day before he left, during a family reunion at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba. He was fourteen. The episode that followed for Max had always troubled him. “I guess I just think everything’s a party, and it’s not,” Adam says. “I am an old man and I’ve just got to stop the booze.”

The story only begins to make sense when Adam stops the car at a teller machine on Oxford Street. He needs to borrow $600 from me, and he doesn’t want me to know he is using it to score.

*

“Extreme intoxication, I suppose, was a method of coping,” Adam said. “I was self-medicating at a very early age. I loved being with my dad, but I was into things that people don’t really approve of. It was a way of hiding from people. I used to hide a lot – a hell of a lot.”

Adam could not explain addiction without mentioning dislocation, then pain relief. Drugs began as a rebellion but soon became a salve for his loneliness. Adam worked hard to isolate himself, then struggled to fill the void left by the absence of other people. “There was a band called the Anti-Nowhere League,” he said, trying to explain an adolescence he never properly outgrew. “They had a song called ‘I Hate People’, and I had a T-shirt with ‘I Hate People’ written on it. I was seventeen – just a fucking boy – and my mother fucking hated it.”

Adam rarely painted without first finishing a bottle of vodka. He would often shoot up on the couch before heading to the studio. When Adam said he was hiding, it was not from life but from his talent. He was terrified by the prospect of being judged sober. Drugs were a crutch he finally couldn’t work without. “I suppose it puts some protection there,” he confessed one night. “It puts some space between me and the work, and I think I need that.”

He also liked the myth – the cadre of artists into which heroin put him. Some nights he would call himself the next Brett Whiteley; other times it would be Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs, whom he called Bill. He felt drugs put him in contact with a reality hidden from other people, that they made his story interesting, that they added complexity to an uncomplicated childhood. Drugs were a paradox for Adam: a way of staying in touch with the reality of the street while he put himself out of touch with the realities of life.

“A person has to go to the street – the street to find things, the street to talk, the street for relief. We all have to go,” he said. “I’m not a junkie. I don’t look like a junkie. I don’t talk like a junkie. I’m not a junkie, but if you want help you have to go get it. It’s not something I think about, but if I can get it I will. It’s the best pain relief ever.”

*

It was in Hill End, outside Bathurst, that Adam identified the first signs of the pancreatitis that eventually filleted him, taking his gallbladder and cutting significant portions from several other organs. The year was 2007. “I was drinking and confused and really bitter,” he said. “It was something I didn’t think of as my fault. I thought, ‘Why me?’ I was absolutely indestructible.”

The location said a lot about Adam’s myth: he wanted to think of himself as the last of the wild colonials, but an artist residency in the gold town had shown him he did not belong. He was not made for the bush, and nor was the bush what he thought it would be. “I was going up there for R&R, and all I did was shoot and ride and drink and ride horses around like a drunk bushranger riding around with a fucking sidearm,” he said. “I got back and I woke up one morning feeling like I’d been shot in the chest. No, in the guts. Basically, I wasn’t around people who really liked me very much. They were basically very scared of me. I’m not pissing in my own pocket, but I was an intellectual. I didn’t befriend anyone up there. I certainly didn’t make friends with the publican. The head barman was a prick. He’d cut you, but it wasn’t any of his own business. I spent a lot of time drinking alone. That was my choice. I was out all day and up all night.”

Even as he told the story – and he told it always with bitterness – he was warming to the circumstances. Foremost in Adam’s mind was his conviction in the power of experience. “I think you understand things when you live them, otherwise it’s still just an idea – just a fucking idea,” he said. “People don’t understand the agony I’ve endured through that operation. My surgeon said it would kill most people, but I’m still alive. I suppose that’s why I throw myself around; I suppose I just don’t care anymore. It’s not immortality but mortality: I actually know how close I can get.”

*

In his final years Adam uses the black-market narcotic OxyContin and keeps a prescription to the Methadone-like opioid Physeptone. He is also injecting heroin.

We drive to three different houses in Katoomba, looking to score. The taxi waits out front of each. Most of the dealers on whom Adam relies are users themselves, and the supply is unreliable. He finally gets a sheet of OxyContin. Adam is adamant he needs the drug to relieve pain in his abdomen, but he crushes the pills and injects them like smack. “I still have to get my kicks somehow,” he says. “People don’t want you to have fun, but I want to have fun.”

The first pancreatitis operation left Adam with forty-two stitches snaking the length of his abdomen: “I could feel every one, tearing at my guts – raw flesh stitched together with these staples, just waiting to tear open.”

His weight dropped to fifty-two kilograms: “All I was focused on was staying alive, which was a big thing considering I had never done that … I went from being a guy who thought he was great to being this piece of shit. A shrink told me I have what soldiers have: PTSD.”

For the first time, he started using antidepressants seriously: “I tried three courses in about eight months, then I stopped. It just makes me impotent and constipated and flat. I didn’t want to have any fun. I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t want to go out because people are boring. Australia is so fucking boring. You can’t say this, you can’t do this. There’s all these fucking laws. I arose from the dead but not as the same person: I’m not the same person. I’m not as accepting. I’m not as forgiving. I’m a little bit less tolerant of most things. I look after myself. I’m a little bit more self-concerned.”

Survival made Adam boastful. Concern from others made him feel wanted. He likened himself to Prometheus, living recklessly for the benefit of those less brave, stealing from the gods to give mortals fire: “I sold more work in those three months in hospital than I’ve ever sold. I made $300,000 – $100,000 a month – because people thought I was dead. I was loaded in hospital: loaded with money and loaded with morphine. It was fucking amazing. It was such a great experience, a great Promethean experience. I felt like some dying Caesar.”

Even after the operation, Adam did not stop using. If anything, the pain made him use more: “I put myself through a test. I’m still harming myself. Not as much as I used to. I was as sober as a judge and it was as boring as bat-shit. I’ve never been bored. I’ve never said, ‘Mum, I’m bored.’ I was never one of those kids.”

*

Adam loved overstatement. He couldn’t help himself. Lies are the first and most enduring symptom of addiction. He told me once that he had been the driver in the Nugan Hand Bank murder. His interest in crime always helped along his interest in drugs. He liked that both were illicit: it made him feel special. “I can’t remember the exact date, but it was March 1987,” he said. “He was a bald Negro in a grey suit. I picked him up at the airport and eight hours later I dropped him back there, and I can just remember how all I could smell on him was the gunpowder.”

The story was a detailed one. Adam’s mostly were. “I always start conversations with people in bars,” he said. “That’s what a bar is for.” Adam said he was twenty-one when he met Bernie Houghton, a suspected CIA-connected spy and a director of the Nugan Hand Bank, a criminal front implicated in arms trading, drug trafficking, money laundering and the financing of a war in Laos. “I didn’t even know who he was. He had terrible dress sense. He used to wear these pale blue or orange cardigans. And these slightly flowery gay pants with a pleat. I think his shoes even had a brogue, and a horrible green tie and that fucking cardigan. I was imagining who this guy in this horrible cardigan – this accountant – was until he opened his mouth and this broad American accent came out. Then you knew why he wore the cardigan.”

Houghton owned the Bourbon and Beefsteak in Kings Cross, an R&R bar where Adam liked to eat late breakfasts. “It was great there, because they used to cook a fantastic breakfast, and I think they had these great ex-army cooks or something,” he said. “They’d make a fry-up – eggs, bacon, tomato, real American hash browns – and I would have that with a few Bloody Marys and the condiments. God, I remember they had just the best condiments – whatever you wanted.”

Adam said Houghton came to like him and eventually asked him to work as a driver. He started with small jobs. Houghton let him look in on his world a little, and Adam enjoyed it. When authorities started looking too closely at the Nugan Hand Bank, Houghton asked if he would drive on a bigger job. Adam did not know it at the time, but one of the bank’s directors, Frank Nugan, was to be the victim of a hit.

“I didn’t really tell many people, because I couldn’t. I just wanted to be the suspicious young chap who hung around there sporadically,” he said. “Most people thought I was just a driver. Usually it was just picking up a crate of scotch off the docks from a guy who owed him, or picking up meat from a place down in Pyrmont. They were actually criminal-class gentlemen: they kept with their own and they didn’t involve people on the street. It was probably only half a year, but it just sticks in my head – what I saw but didn’t see. I didn’t know how bad a lot of this was, but the shit that used to go down there …”

The story is perfect Adam. He has a gift for association, for the occasional glamour that hangs around criminals. After two royal commissions, the responsibility for Nugan’s death is still uncertain. Initial investigations called it a suicide. No one has been convicted for the crime. “I always sort of tried to maintain some sort of double existence, in a way,” Adam said. “But I suppose I’m not very good at it. This whole outsider thing – being outside the law but being respectable – I just think it’s a very human thing to be interested in a more sort of dark side. Also, it’s a fucking lot of fun. It’s nice to be able to hand a copper a crate of whisky and tell him to get out of here. That’s power. It’s a cheap version of power, but when you’re a young kid it’s great.”

He starts on the condiments again. “I just loved all the condiments: relishes, Worcestershire sauce, Dijon mustard, English mustard, American mustard, catsup, cranberry. They had everything.”

Adam was fourteen years old in 1980 when Frank Nugan was found dead in his Mercedes outside Lithgow. “Oh,” he says when I confront him with this. “Maybe it was something else.”

*

Adam arrives at my twenty-first birthday party by taxi. He is skeletal, his legs like bones in empty jeans, his stomach bloated with disease.

He walks up to the painter McLean Edwards, an old friend. “Hey, dig,” he says. “Looks like it’s going to rain.” Edwards looks at Adam. The two men have not spoken in several years. “It just did.”

The meter running outside, Adam goes into the bathroom and shoots up. I am living at the time in a little house on a big block near the train line in Marrickville. For the next two hours he stands in the garden and tells my grandmother what it is like to be an artist. He calls me the next morning to rhapsodise on the importance of family. We rarely have another conversation in which he does not ask after my nan’s health.

*

When Adam was first diagnosed with pancreatitis – “my pancreas was eating itself and eating my body” – he became convinced he would die. He was in bed for three months, being fed through his nose. Tubes ran out of him, draining pus and urine into bags strung around his bed. He refused to accept what was happening, that drugs and drink had caused this. And yet the dependency he felt on other people – on medicine – bruised him. He never properly regained his reckless confidence.

“It was so weird. I was incredibly dependent. I couldn’t talk because my tongue was stuck to the top of my mouth, talking like a fucking retard,” he said. “My arm, the side of my body – everything was so strange. I was like a puppet. I could feel my body kicking into action, trying to stay alive. I just had to touch my gown to feel pain. I craved cocktails – little green drinks with umbrellas on top. And I wanted cocktail frankfurts in a bun with sauerkraut and lots of mustard. I was just a big baby. I looked like a feeble little girl. I was so sickly, with a big head and big jaw, sickly arms and sickly little legs.”

If Adam’s life ended in two great indignities, this was the first. The second was his weapons case. In sketchbooks Adam started drawing himself as an anonymous figure with a leaking penis. The only distinguishing marks were the scarred drainage holes puncturing his abdomen, each drawn as a heavy X, and a line of stitches buckling the length of his stomach. “It’s a pretty life-changing thing,” he said of the pancreatitis. “It’s affected my relationships. My body image isn’t that good, my sense of self. But everyone has their own issues with self.”

*

Adam is high when he calls Chopper Read. He has been watching a late session of parliament and aping the Speaker’s call: “The Member for Blah Blah. The Member for Blah Blah will resume his seat.”

He has decided he needs another gun and that he should call Read to get it. The two keep in steady contact after Read slipped a trip into Adam’s drink while he was being painted for the Archibald Prize. They published a children’s book together. Adam was the best man at Read’s wedding, and is a godparent to his son. Occasionally a truck will pull up outside Adam’s house with a present from Read: a gun, or a taser, or a packet of photographs.

The voice at the other end of the phone is also high. “Yes, it’s Uncle Chop Chop,” he says. “Been on the old Harry, have we? The Harry Houdini.”

The call drops out and Adam is unable to reconnect the line. We start to talk again about drugs. I mention the home enema kit that sits on top of his toilet cistern, the constipation of opiates. Adam confesses it has been two years since he ate solids without vomiting. He can no longer digest meat. His diet is reduced mostly to milk and fruit juice. Not infrequently, he seems pathetic.

We sit for a time, him in racing stillness, in heroin’s numb facsimile of death. “I need drugs,” he says finally. “I don’t know what it’s like without them anymore.”

*

The growth doctors thought was pancreatic cancer, two years after Adam’s first operation, turned out to be a benign tumour on his spleen the size of a fist. While his second Melbourne show was opening at Tolarno Galleries, he was having exploratory surgery at Nepean Hospital. A stent was inserted to connect a bile duct to his spleen.

“If I wasn’t sick, this would be a great holiday,” Adam says. “Bed, TV, heaps of food. And excellent pain relief. I’ve even got a new pot plant. My father brought a bromeliad up.”

For the first time, however, he says he is scared. “I don’t mind them removing foreign bodies, but I don’t want them taking any more organs out. I kind of want them for a bit longer. And I’m not the sort of guy that could do a bag. I would be putting the .347 into my mouth.”

When I arrive with a pack of Peter Stuyvesants, he is reading Bill “Swampy” Marsh’s Great Australian Droving Stories. Sickness made him long to be a child. He takes my notepad and sketches me. It is rudimentary, but the biro scratches in with great purpose. He spends most time on my sideburns and jaw.

“I try to take every day as it comes now,” he says. “I’m starting to fade to grey. But I’m not going to ruin dying with something that might not happen. I’m not fucking dead yet and it will take a lot to kill me. It has so far and I’m not going without a fight. I’m not sure what Hunter S. Thompson would say about this, but involving friends in your own death wish is fun, dragging people into your own hellhole of adventure. I’m a ticking time bomb. I just like to push things. I just have to push it. If you push things, you know where things are: you know where you can go.”

I wait outside the bathroom cubicle while Adam shoots up, then wheel him back to bed.