GOLD-TOP MUSHROOMS are hallucinogens. They contain the active ingredient psilocybin, or so amateur pharmacists investigating cheap thrills tell me. These shrooms grow very nicely in cow manure and, as the cattle farms near the cities were sold up for acreage residentials from the 1970s, their supply decreased in the 1980s.
As far as I know, urban hippies, grazing in the country, discovered magic mushrooms, of which gold tops were one variety. The popularity spread throughout the 1970s. The definitive Australian history of hallucinogens is yet to be written, so Buddha knows who was chomping on these mushies in the years before their colonisation by the hippies.
One amateur historian tells me adolescent country boys, never known for temperance, indulged in the mushrooms but they sparked what was considered bizarre behaviour. The lads reverted to strong rum, which prompted acceptable misbehaviour such as fist fights round midnight and verbal abuse of young women.
Mick pointed to a paddock after we had negotiated enough back roads that I only had a hazy notion of the direction towards the coast. Still, I was confident I could follow my nose home again, as long as I left the devouring of the mushies to my mate.
We had hardly seen a car in the fifteen minutes before we reached the paddock, so it felt safe enough, though I drove the EH across a stretch of grass to park under a tree out of sight of the road.
Mick walked over to the paddock, enclosed by a wooden post-and-rail fence, and climbed between two rails. I leaned on the fence to look towards the road and the hilltop farmhouse, the best part of a kilometre away. Binoculars are almost as much loved in the bush as guns, so I was hoping that no one was enjoying a magnified view of our goings-on from the house on the hill. From deep in the paddock, Mick yelled to me. ‘I need your help here, Steele.’
I walked over to him and saw he held about a dozen small to medium shrooms, with a gold ring around the top of each of their crowns.
‘How many of them do you want?’ I asked, thinking Clarence was looking greedy already, as one or two mushrooms was considered a standard dose.
Mick’s eyes were still scouring the ground for the illegal fungi.
‘We need as many as we can get,’ Mick said, ‘a hundred or 150, if we can.’
Only a lunatic would want that many – perhaps a loon who planned to feed most of them to a horse. We searched every centimetre of that paddock, without any hassles from the police or the farm owner. After a while, Mick had to take off his T-shirt to use as a bag for the mushrooms. Back at the EH, I found an old string shopping bag in the boot and we transferred the fungi there, counting 116 mushrooms. Now Mick could wear his cool T-shirt again, and not have to show off his thin, pale body for comparison with the tanned hides of the disciples of the Sun God.
‘We going home?’ I asked Mick. ‘We’re loaded up with what we came for, so let’s get out of here before our hair starts to turn blond and we develop an addiction to hamburgers and milkshakes.’
We made a concession to our surroundings by going for a swim in the ocean, near Burleigh. Mick wore his jeans into the sea, while I swam in my dress shorts. Judging from our swimwear, you might gather that neither of us brought a towel, and we sat on the bonnet of the EH to sun-dry ourselves. However, being Brissie boys with only a casual exposure to sunbathing, we quickly lost patience with that and were content to drip water on the seat of the EH ute. By the time we were on Brissie’s outskirts, our clothes were pretty dry.
Back in Mick’s unit, we spread the mushrooms out on a tea towel on the coffee table in the lounge. Mick discarded the three poisonous toadstools among the crop, lit a cigarette and lay back in his armchair to contemplate a large quantity of potential go-fast. I sat in the small kitchen chair across from the young man and stared at our haul.
‘Them’s a lot of mushies; do we need that many?’ I asked.
Mick also stared at the bounty. ‘I think so. I had a law student visit me one day and he was eating them like salted peanuts. He was still standing when he left, a few hours later. He was a big fella, but a fraction of the half-tonne a horse tips the scales at.’
‘How are you going to feed them to Who Loves Yer Baby?’ I was curious.
‘I’ll work that out with Bill Smith. Ask him to come over on Wednesday night. We may have to practise to get the dose right.’
‘That’s the tricky part awlright. How’ll we know the right dose?’
‘I really haven’t a clue. In case something goes wrong, Steele, I hope you don’t think this is science. You’ll have to make sure to free Smith’s daughter before Saturday’s race.’
‘You’re right. I’ll try, Mick. So, how did you come up with the idea of using mushies, anyway?’
He lit another cigarette, though there was hardly room for one more butt in the crammed ashtray. ‘It was like I was trying to tell you on the way down in the car.’
That must have been when our conversation diverted to the subjects of greyhounds, and how his old man topped himself. Mick had clammed right up, but now he continued where he had left off.
‘As I was saying, a few dodgy characters among the greyhound crowd use a mixture of heroin or coke and speed. That’s mainly on suburban tracks, where they’re racing for a betting plunge rather than for prize money.’
He digressed. ‘If it made the papers, reporters would call that “a cocktail of drugs”. Whenever some evildoer flirts with more than one drug, it’s a cocktail. Reporters make drug addicts out to be swallowing half a chemist shop. I guess in the media’s defence, a lot of cocktails only have a couple of . . .’
‘Mick, will you get on with it?’ I said, exasperated.
‘Sorry, Steele. It’s the way I think these unscientific cases through, bouncing one idea off another. As I said, we don’t know what the drug detectors can or cannot test for. I’d suspect that heroin, coke and speed would be high up on their lists. Even if they weren’t, we wouldn’t have a clue what dose to give the horse. We would really be in it if our champion dropped dead from a heart attack before our eyes, and the eyes of thousands of other punters, not to mention the stewards.’
‘Mick,’ I said testily, to give him a hurry-along. So far, his leisurely story was not letting through many rays of sunlight.
‘All bloody right, Steele. You’d think you’d have a little sympathy for my medical condition. You realise I have limited social interaction, so I like to tell my tales slowly.’
I gave up. ‘Awlright, Mick. I’ll ignore the fact this place is like Central Station and agree about your limited social interaction. We’re all counting on you, so I’ll let you go on with it, any way you want.’
He took me at my word. Instead of continuing, he sat down cross-legged beside the mushrooms. He picked up a handful, sniffed them and rolled them around his palm with his fingers. Then he put them back, grabbed a second bunch with his left hand and repeated the ritual, finally stabbing his right index finger into the air in triumph.
‘Sorry, Steele, I was distracted. I’ve just worked out how we’re going to dope the horse. Let me and Bill worry over that. If you have a few pieces left out of your memory of what happened, it might help you justify yourself to the stewards or the coppers.’
He chewed half a mushroom, offering me the other half. I declined, so he ate it, then went to his fridge and returned with a litre carafe of water.
‘I don’t know what these mushies will do to a horse. I presume they only take them in the wild by accident when they’re grazing. We’re gambling that they won’t ring the bells on a computer when they run a test on Who Loves Yer Baby. If they’re testing for psilocybin, the racing authorities are a lot hipper than I give them credit for.’
Mick chewed half of another mushroom and swallowed it before he continued. ‘We do know what shrooms do to people. They provide a great deal of stamina for work, play or prolonged contemplation of the universe. I’ve also seen people unable to sign their names after a few fungi, but Who Loves Yer Baby won’t have to sign his scorecard even if he romps in and sets a track record. We just have to be sure that the human part of the equation, the jockey up top, does right by us.’
I had been thinking about that. When I finally found Flick Sailor, I would ask her to lie low until after the race, not to go running back to her husband. ‘I told Mick Felicity being mad at her husband could work in our favour. ‘I doubt she’ll want to help her father but, if she’s grateful to me for arranging her freedom, she might play along.’
‘Offer her ten grand if the horse wins,’ Mick said in an authoritative voice, which proclaimed that he had quickly solved that problem.
I told Mick I didn’t have $10,000. I’d never seen such an amount in my life.
He took a hearty swig of water. ‘If this horse wins, you’ll see a lot more than ten grand. That I can guarantee.’
‘You’re going to have a go at the horse, even though you have no idea whether the mushies will work,’ I said, shaking my head in disbelief.
‘Why not?’ he replied. ‘If the stewards aren’t going to find any trace of drugs, they can wonder as much as they like as to the reason for a successful plunge. They’ll probably figure Bill Smith and Gregory Sailor have taken the horse to a private track, and it’s been running sensational times. I’d really kick myself if, after all the hassle we’re going through, it won without us backing it. I can only vaguely recall its recent form, but I know it’s only been in open company for this campaign, and only has a couple of minor placings at best. It’s got to start between twelve-to-one and twenty-to-one, so a few grand on its nose will not go astray.’
So Mick was going to the track? This would turn our spree into a life-changing adventure for him. On that score, I was wide of the mark.
‘No, I will definitely be listening to our big one on my trusty radio. On Saturday morning, you swing by about ten. I’ll give you a satchel. You probably won’t want to put it all on at once, and create more suspicion than we need to. Every time Mecklam’s boys have a go at their horse, you follow with a decent whack on ours. No need to put your own money on. You can have ten grand from any winnings, the same as Felicity.’
I rolled my eyes heavenward. ‘Buddha, Mick, how much are you putting on?’
‘At least twenty grand will be in the briefcase, Steele. And Bill Smith and Gregory Sailor receive not a cracker from any of our winnings.’
He nodded his head up and down to confirm his decree was fair. ‘Those bastards have got themselves all in a sweat with their fighting and fucking, and they leave us to clean up the mess. Now, it’s our turn to party.’
He popped some more mushrooms in his mouth, put Hendrix on the stereo and invited me to stay for tea. I asked him what he had to eat, and he pointed to the mushrooms drying on the tea towel.
I said I would grab some Chinese take-away. ‘Don’t eat all of our investment capital,’ I told him. I left Mick Clarence laughing heartily as he slipped on a pair of headphones to indulge in a golden purple haze.