SEX

“It’s alright. I’m not going to fuck you.”

There is nothing dramatic about Adam’s black eye. He fell on the back stairs, shifting pot plants in the rain. But the swelling makes it difficult to cry. The tears pool in the purpled flesh and the bruises make painful his attempts to wipe them away.

“You probably know I’m on the border of bisexual,” Adam says through the crying. “I think you can smell me a mile away.”

We are sitting in the front room of his house. The lights are off. A newly acquired bearskin lies in front of us, the head still attached. An enormous fish trap has arrived since I was last here. This is among the only interviews we have done without drink or drugs. His court case for weapons possession ended only a few weeks earlier. Adam says he is ashamed: in public, he has only ever been straight.

“I prefer the company of men,” Adam offers, “as a lot of writers and artists have said.” He pushes through the tears, fending off emotion as if giving some urgent instructions. He knows he will soon change the subject, but he wants to finish this thought. “Women – and this is a great quote – my father said that the best advice his father gave him – my grandfather, Fred, who I haven’t met – he said, ‘Kevin, be careful: women are queer cattle.’” Adam had used a similar line when we first met: “As my granddaddy said, ‘If it’s got tits, wheels or fur, you’re fucked.’”

Adam stops trying to wipe away the tears. He cries openly and his speech becomes unvarnished. But he looks away to make his points. I have rarely seen him so uncomfortable.

“I haven’t been openly gay or bi before, but I prefer men because women are fucking stupid,” he says. “I do like holding men. Holding men is nice. We people are great specimens. I suppose I should quote Shakespeare: ‘What a piece of work is a man.’”

Classroom Hamlet is perhaps the right place to start: Adam was at school when he first realised he liked men, although he immediately suppressed the feeling. He had not really had girlfriends. Women were scared of him. He blamed his stutter but didn’t understand it.

*

The first night I stay at Adam’s place in Wentworth Falls, the little cottage is quilted by fog. These are the first and coldest days of winter. The air is wet with cloud. Cold freezes trees against the sky, jack-frosting their branches as in a velvet painting. All day the valley has been filling up with mist until eventually it spills over and swallows the house itself.

Adam has shot up on the couch, where we are sitting side by side. The conversation is about his mother. He is working at extending a track mark that is gradually underlining the shamrock tattoo on his forearm, as if the clover leaf is a scout badge inexpertly stitched to him. We have been drinking vodka from tin mugs, gunky where the price had been stuck to them in whichever camping store they were bought.

“You need to shower,” Adam says to me. “I want you to shower for me.” His eyes are rolling in and out of opiate blinks. He sways a little. Adam leans his body against mine, although I am not sure if the gesture is sexual. He is both affectionate and aggressive. His whole presence is heavy. “I want you to shower.”

Poor circulation gives Adam’s fingertips a bluish tinge, which makes more of the pink crescents where he has chewed his nails down past the quick. It also highlights the scratches that take forever to heal. He pushes his hand onto my leg and squeezes my thigh until it starts to hurt. Heroin has slowed his speech. Everything seems to be moving more slowly. His hand moves up and down my leg, resting occasionally to grip my thigh. He mutters the word “good” over and over. I don’t know how to move.

After a long silence Adam gets up and walks to another room. I can hear him looking for something, pulling books off shelves. He comes back with a folded towel and a cake of motel soap. Its wrapping is waxy and crinkled from coming in and out of bags.

He asks me again to shower and I make a series of excuses. He pleads with me. What started as a demand now sounds like a desperate entreaty. “Just shower,” he says. “Please.”

*

At school Adam liked mixing with the strong boys. “I was always the outsider. I was in with the bad group, but the smartest of the bad group. I was in English 1 and Art 1 and they were in English 4. Most of my friends lived in fibros.”

He had a girlfriend in his final year. They got drunk together at school camp – he remembered her being impressed that he had brought alcohol – but nothing sexual occurred between them. He was nervous around her and sensed she was scared of him. Fear is a constant in the way he talks about sex – why it happens and why it doesn’t. Life to Adam is an unending assessment of who can handle him and who cannot.

It was at art school that Adam lost his virginity, later than his friends. “Art school was basically a sex fest – no boys, but as I get older I enjoy the company of men,” he says. “Men can handle me now. They used to be scared of me. Men are straight shooters, as a hunter would say.”

By the time we talk about his sexuality, Adam is reading William S. Burroughs obsessively, especially the gay novella Queer. He is excited by the thought that Burroughs shot his wife and boasts that he attacked his own long-term partner, Carrie, with a cattle prod. The truth is he threatened her with a knife and a gun. An apprehended violence order against him was granted shortly afterwards.

“I have thought about sleeping with men, but it’s nothing more than hugs. It’s a little bit like Bill Burroughs. A lot of bisexual men like hugs. I just like hugging men. Women can’t do that – they’re fucking weak at it. You can’t hold a woman.”

I think of an ink and collage work Adam made in 1996, called I like the suburbs. He was interested at the time in manifestos. In the work, alongside campaign stickers for the Truck Safe Foundation and a scrapbook doodle, he wrote one for himself:

I’ve always lived in the northern suburbs
I like the suburbs

There’s no wogs

No gooks

No blacks

This is why I really like

Blowing up letter boxes

With copper pipe bombs

When I’m bored I watch

The girls next door

Play with their things

And I wonder why I’m here

All the time dying
I’m really happy But not gay

One bit.

*

During that first week staying in Adam’s spare room, I twice woke to find him standing over my bed. There was a shotgun propped in one corner and a crossbow in another. A signed poster of the Wenham portrait was framed on one wall, like a piece of pool-room memorabilia. Beside the bed was an anonymous puddle of dried vomit, puckering the carpet into rough peaks. The sheets were silk and yellowed, darkened where other bodies had lain. The bed had a gathered skirt that seemed faintly ridiculous, as though a teenage boy were living in his grandmother’s house.

The windows were always shuttered, but in the darkness it was clear Adam was naked. He would stand there for a moment, neither of us saying anything, and then he would leave. There was nothing menacing about his presence. He seemed nervous. Drugs had made his body insubstantial. The morning after this first happened he told me a long and contradictory story about how he suffered as a sleepwalker.

*

“Handsome” was Adam’s greatest term of affection. Paintings were never beautiful, certainly not pretty: they were handsome. He coined the term “hetero-camp” to describe what he liked about the glamour of a bullfight: the traje de luces, the suit of lights. They reminded him of his own performance art. In Barcelona on an artist residency, he had watched six bullfights a day and produced almost no work.

Violence and sex for him were always intertwined. At art school, his aesthetic was forged from the danger of both. He dressed like a skinhead and described as “savage” his relationship with campus feminists. He boasted that he had been a member of the ultra-right National Front and part of a gang that had kicked to death a gay man. “I never really conformed with the group,” he said. “I hung around with the skinheads because I liked the skinheads. I wasn’t necessarily a Nazi, but I have always been interested in the existence of the extreme right. It’s just so handsome. I used to love to go and see bands that would attract that crowd.”

He claimed to have played trumpet briefly and poorly with the punk band feedtime, and with another called Lubricated Goat. This was, so far as I could tell, untrue. “I used to love clothes, really nice skinhead clothes,” he said. “I could never get hassled by anyone. Nice shoes. Skinny braces, fucking white ones. Of course, I got called a poof when I studied art. But not regularly.”

*

Adam steers through the Blue Mountains in the Holden FC he loved but was mostly prevented by court order from driving. It is the cold autumn of 2010. He is talking about us checking into a hotel together. This is a recurrent request, plaintive and sometimes frantic. He is like a schoolboy planning a sleepover. “Just a night,” he says. “It will be great. You and me, getting away. We’ll check into a nice bed and breakfast. It will just be a night.”

We end up camped on a verge in the Megalong Valley. Adam tries and fails to kindle a fire. “Sometimes I feel so weak I just sit there and cry,” he says. “I think I’m kind of done with tenderness. I’m not looking for a relationship unless I sort of fall sideways into one. But I think I need to set up in a new town with new people. Sometimes I’m just so lonely, you know?”

The next morning, I find Adam unconscious in his sleeping bag. He is covered in his own vomit. It is the beginning of an episode of diabetic ketoacidosis that will see him spend a week in Katoomba Hospital. He is put in the room in which his uncle died two years earlier.

*

Resentment courses through everything Adam says. He is shaking now as he works through a list of girlfriends. Carrie Lumby is the first he mentions, although she was not his first. They met at a gallery opening in 1993 and began a decade-long relationship that coincided with the most productive years of his career. Adam said she suspected his interest in men. “I think Carrie had her suspicions, but I was never unfaithful. Women are horny all the time, but I’m just not – I’m not horny. Girls lie. They think they’re God’s gift. If they didn’t have a cunt, they would be stacked eight foot high at the tip. They are weak. I’m not. I’m not fucking weak.”

It is early evening and a truck has just collected the portrait of Gareth Samson that will hang in the Archibald Prize. Adam is drunk and a little strung out. “I am a very lonely person,” he says. “But I’m happy. People are basically stupid, so I can’t have a real conversation. But then there’s this other thing called physical intimacy I miss. I miss that closeness.”

He returns to Lumby: “She was an alcoholic. She was here and she didn’t pay for anything. I was actually her career. She was a complete nightmare and she drove me to drink heavily just to cope. She had me driving down to the grog shop four times a day.”

And then to Cash Brown, his final girlfriend, also an artist: “Cash – that really hurt, looking back and realising that I’ve been left. She was just scared. She always said I’m much too dangerous to be around, emotionally and physically. She once said that because we have a good time, she’s a good friend. I could never hate her. She’s into everything I’m into. If you can imagine a female version of me – if you can imagine it, that’s her. She just thought, this guy’s on his way to hell and I don’t really want to see him there. She didn’t really want to go there with me. I’m still angry, but I could never hate the girl. She’s really hardcore. It’s hard – and this is a quote – it’s hard to find a good hard girl.”

Adam says Brown wrote to his father when the relationship ended, concerned about his drug habit and his drinking. The letter, to Adam’s mind, was a great betrayal. “Maybe I was expecting too much, but I don’t have an emotional or relationship barrier. You either ask too much or too little. That’s why I live alone, because people just ask for too much.”

Transcribing this from the shorthand in my notepad, I am reminded of something Carrie told me in the one interview we did after Adam died. It reminded me of Adam’s relationship with his mother, too. Carrie was a strong woman, like Cash. Both had the toughness Adam required from relationships. “What he hated about women,” Carrie said, “is that he needed them.”

*

As soon as I arrive, Adam tells me the police are coming. He is not clear on what the crime is, but he says Carrie has called them. He hands me packing tape and kangaroo skins and tells me to help wrap his collection of firearms. The plan is to hide them inside the wall of his back shed, behind a painting of Max Cullen he did for the Moran Prize.

“She’s actually the devil,” he says as we work to wrap the weapons. “She’s a tough. She’s a liar. She’s bad news. She thinks she’s a really good person, which I think is a good sign of a really bad one.”

The police never come. The episode was entirely imagined. A week later Adam calls and accuses me of stealing his guns. I tell him they are in the wall cavity. He hangs up after telling me not to take him for a fool.

*

“I give people their best, but then they screw me up,” Adam says. “Have some guts or some balls or some honesty. Everything I have is on the table. You don’t fuck with me. I’m happy single. I’m sick of people. I mean, I act badly, but I don’t hurt people. I only hurt myself.” He turns the conversation to loneliness, which will become a regular theme of these soliloquies. “It’s not hurtful anymore,” he says. “It’s just disappointing. I’m just over these people.”

We are in the studio, after Adam has been released from hospital. He is high. A temporary stent has been inserted to contain his leaking bile, but his skin has a sickly yellow afterglow. “I sort of wish Cash Brown loved me as much as I loved her,” he says. “I think she was always a little bit scared of me. I think that’s what love’s about – being scared.”

*

Adam was an obsessive. He would fixate on people. Phone calls would come at any hour. Emails would arrive in my inbox in volleys, no time allowed for a response. Their punctuation was as erratic as their thoughts. “Hello mate ..have you been stolen away, like a beautiful child ??” began one. “...must see you ...lots to talk within ! ..? call me mate ..ive got time at moment ..two shows approaching”.

Seconds later, in an email titled “Please call me”: “HEY DIG ... CALL ME YEA ! ADXOO” And then again: “CALL ME DIGGER. ADXOO”. And then the next one, titled “Are you dead”: “Are you ok??.please call ..i miss you .. adxo”.

Sometimes these messages would come from nowhere, about conversations never had: “Hey dig, great to hear ya voice’’..talk real soon .. u r’ the last intell’’ bloke in the world!!!! I need a real big hug ! ///telling me every things god dammn ok !@..yours always .. ad’;’ xoo”.

Or plans unmade: “I WISH I WAS WITH YOU , I MISS YOU ...ANY WAY , WE SHOULD GO AWAY TOGETHER ...MAY BE ASIA SOME WHERE WEIRD !! ... LOVE , AD’’ XXOO”.

Sometimes they were lonely, empty but for the sign-off: “love you, Ad xxoo”.

In email, Adam was never guarded: “i need you !! ..ad’’x”.

*

We are in Adam’s studio, talking about his mother. He says, again, that she neglected his feelings. Immediately, he is talking about sex. “Women are great, but they should be avoided as much as possible. What’s the point? Ten seconds of exalted pleasure? What’s the fucking point? Women are like polar bears: beautiful at a distance, but stay away from them. They will kill you. They will eat you. I’ve been celibate for eighteen months. There’s nothing like a skinny chick in bed, but you never want them to wake up in the morning. I’m not sure that can be seen as misogyny, because it’s not.”

It would be another year before Adam and I first talked about his sexuality, but the subject is scratching at the edges of our conversation. “I have come to a point where I’m a little bit confused. Not with myself – I’m always fine – but with other people. The more I avoid women, the happier I feel. That’s odd. I don’t know what it means, but it’s great. It’s leaving my head very empty and I can fill it with other things.”

*

I ask Adam why he has hidden from his sexuality, but he doesn’t have an answer. He has only just announced these feelings. I suspect it is because, at heart, he wants badly to be a country boy – to be some copy of his father: charming, funny, good with women. Instead, he has created for himself a character of violent machismo that would have been destroyed by his affection for men.

I had been incurious about Adam’s sexuality. Certainly, I had been incurious about him romantically and I had never properly considered our relationship. Suddenly, it is all there: the showers, the nudity, the elegiac emails, the lingering touches, the fantasies about taking hotel rooms together, the pretense of this book with which he has convinced me to stay at his house. I think back to something Adam said early in our interviews, a line I never really understood: “You’re the only man for me.” Sitting opposite him, I finally twig: Adam is in love with me.

I ask if this hidden sexuality is the reason he has worked so hard to distance himself from society, the reason he has become so isolated and so resentful of the world. “It’s some of it,” he says. “It’s a fucking lot of it, actually.”

At the end of the interview, Adam pauses in the stunted hallway between me and the front door. He opens his arms to be hugged. Adam presses his body against mine, squeezing my torso as hard as he can. His eyes close, one black and the other now red from crying. The grip is so firm it hurts. Breath is forced from my lungs.

“It’s alright,” he whispers in my ear. “I’m not going to fuck you.”