In the lead-up to my fight on the Kostya Tszyu card in 1996, it was a terrible struggle to stay away from alcohol. I had been addicted for some years by then, and my obsession to have a drink was so strong but I was determined to give my last fight my best shot. I wanted a drink badly. It was driving me mad. I was on edge all the time, no one could talk to me. I succumbed and had a few. I didn’t have the strength to say no.
Then when the bell rang at the end of that fight, I no longer had a reason not to drink and I let myself be overwhelmed by alcohol.
From 1996, I was a hopeless drunk. I lived to get smashed. I continued to sweep the streets in the morning – I loved the early hours as the city came awake and the homeless men were still my friends – and I organised the defence of clients who came to my firm in Elizabeth Street. But really, I was working to earn the money for my addiction.
I didn’t get drunk every day. My week would go something like this. No drinking, or at least not too much, on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday; that’s when I’d practise law. On Friday I’d jump out of bed and go sweeping. Then I would go to the pub and reward myself. That first taste of Jack Daniel’s with Coke tasted so bloody good. I felt relaxed, confident, strong, brilliant, irresistible. I wasn’t drinking for the taste, I was drinking to get drunk. I loved that first sensation of fuzzy euphoria that alcohol gave me, and then came the wild optimism, which became anger and aggression, then crazy behaviour, and then sweet oblivion. My binge-drinking would go on, by and large, for four days in a row, Friday to Monday. These days were a blur. All I know is that when Tuesday rolled around again, I’d wake up cut and bruised and sick, with that vague grim knowledge that I’d been in a heap of trouble. Typically I would have broken up with a lover over my abusive behaviour, I would have fallen down drunk, passed out, hurt myself when I hit the ground. I would have been in a fight and been ejected from a pub or club. I would have lost my money and my car keys and sometimes my car. I lost my skateboard. I insulted friends. Smashed my car and did reckless, stupid and deeply irresponsible things. I’d sweep the streets on Tuesday morning, go home to my room in a pub or on a mate’s spare bed, take a shower, iron my shirt, get dressed, go to a café to load up on fruit salad, and then go to my office, hung-over, shaking and sweating pure alcohol, to represent my clients, thinking, Three days of this and then I’m back on the piss again. You beauty! The sun was always over my yard-arm.
This was my life from 1996 to 2002.
Go figure: for some reason, I’ve always had girlfriends, beautiful women who loved me and wanted to take care of me. I rewarded them with vicious and unreasonable behaviour. I couldn’t help myself. It always ended in tears.
There was one woman I loved very much and it was painful when she left. We complemented each other well and when we were sober, for she was a drinker, too, we got on well. Her parting words to me were, ‘Steve, I’m not enough for you. With you, there’s always got to be something else. A girl who loves you for yourself is not enough.’
Another lover who will stay in my heart was a sporty girl, but our relationship didn’t stand a chance against my drinking and dysfunctional ways. She wisely got out when she realised we had no future.
I had relationships with women who forgave me. These beautiful women, today I call them my hostages, were needy and wanted my love, and I took advantage of that by treating them badly. No matter what I did, I thought they would never leave me, like my father and mother had done. Usually they stuck around for a while, did their best to put up with me, then threw up their hands and left me. I damaged them. Today, when I think of what I did to them, I shudder in my shame.
In my lucid moments I realised that I was replicating the behaviour of my father. He chose the bottle over love. I did too. I wonder sometimes if I was trying to be like Dad because I loved him in spite of everything he’d done to our family. I made excuses for him, thinking that he wasn’t nasty, just weak. Everything was unresolved with me and my old man. I didn’t know why he left. Was it my fault? I went in search of him to get the connection. I tracked him down a couple of times when I was in my twenties, and even stayed with him, though our relations were awkward and tetchy. He lived at Marrickville with some woman. I was intrigued by him, and though he is long gone, I still am.
My father died a bad death in 1997. He was in dreadful pain, alone and unloved. I made a kind of peace with him near the end. I didn’t recognise him when I walked into the room where he lay in bed, his ribs broken and lung punctured after a fall. His liver was riddled with cirrhosis, the alcoholic’s disease. Alison and I went to his funeral. James did not.
I can see my old man with compassion. My brother, who hasn’t been to the dark places I have been, and where my father went, cannot understand why Dad abandoned us. He despises my father because of what he did to our family, because he hasn’t walked in his shoes. I have.
In these dark days of my own life, 1996 to 2002, I became my father.
One night I promised my lover I would not go to the pub. ‘Let’s stay in together,’ I said. ‘I’ll go to the local Indian takeaway in Darlinghurst and bring back dinner and we can watch Friday Night Football together.’ She said that sounded like fun, so off I went, saying I’d be back in half an hour. The best-laid plans … On my way to the Indian restaurant I ran into a mate who talked me into having a quick bourbon with him at the Green Park Hotel. At some stage that night as I got more and more drunk I thought to myself that I couldn’t go home now, the restaurant would be closed, the footy on the TV was long finished, my girlfriend would be furious with me, so – in for a penny, in for a pound – I may as well kick on. I arrived home on Sunday just before midday. My face was covered in scratches and I had a welt under my eye, I had lost all my money, and I was too drunk to speak.
Only James, wonderful James, stood up to me. He had ruled me with a fist of iron since before Mum died, and I responded to that. Gentleness and praise cut no ice with me. I was only ever motivated by someone strong enough to come down hard on me. That’s how I answered the bell. Yet if James was tough, it was tough love that he was dispensing. He loved me unequivocally. For a long time, I believe, when I was in my late twenties and early thirties, he was in denial about my alcoholism, even though there were warnings.
Extreme selfishness is another symptom of alcoholism. Without giving a thought to what it meant to James and his finances, I told him that I wanted him to buy me out of the house we co-owned in Randwick. I explained that I needed the money because I wanted to join a girl I was in love with in Europe, where she was holidaying. I said, ‘If you give me twelve grand now, I’ll sign my share of the house over to you.’ Of course in the years since we’d bought it, the house had greatly increased in value, even though the bank owned most of it, and my whim was going to cost me a fortune. I didn’t care. I wanted to join my girlfriend in Europe and I wanted to join her now. James tried to talk me out of it but I insisted. He threw up his hands in despair and said, ‘Sure.’
I regret inconveniencing James, and I regret losing a pile of money, but going to Europe is one of the few things I did in my binge-drinking years that I don’t regret. My memories of that trip will last forever.
It seemed that one minute I was rolling around in a Darlinghurst gutter, and the next I was sitting in a café in Paris, surrounded by beautiful historic buildings, wide boulevards and sophisticated, well-dressed people. And there beside me was my girl.
When my bill came it was the equivalent of $8 for one coffee! I asked the waitress why it was so expensive. She explained, in English because I spoke no French, that if you sit down you get charged more. In future I stood.
We travelled around Paris, walking in the parks and chilling out in the cafés. Then we split up for a while and I travelled alone to some of the most beautiful destinations on Earth: I got pissed in Venice, Florence, the Amalfi Coast in Italy, then in the south of France. I had my drink spiked in a Genoa nightclub and when I woke up lying in the street outside, my wallet containing $2000 worth of lira was missing. I lay in my hotel room for three days, too sick to move. I consumed only mineral water and finally flushed the poison from my system. When I was well enough, I travelled on and rendezvoused with my lover. And of course I started drinking again.
Then, after I returned and was going out with another girl, she, James and I were playing pool together at the Paddington Green Hotel one afternoon, and she said to James, ‘Steve has just drunk five bourbons in an hour. I think he might be an alcoholic.’ James said, ‘What are you talking about? No way.’ After 1996, he could have been in no doubt.
By that stage I didn’t socialise that much with my brother. We moved in different circles, and his circle was a lot more respectable than mine.
Once, after I had got into trouble and was facing charges of drunken affray, a judge told me that he believed my feeling of abandonment was so intense that I couldn’t stand the pain and alcohol had become my anaesthetic. He said that I lashed out at the world that had hurt me by getting drunk, fighting, and letting loved ones down, and that I tried to get people’s attention by stuffing up. He may have had a point. That may all have been a part of my problem.
People could see me in all my drunken ingloriousness four days a week at any of the Eastern Suburbs and city night spots that would still let me in their doors, and as time went on even these establishments dwindled to a handful. Word got around that I was a drunkard, and I had worried phone calls from my father figures, men who loved me such as Bruce Collins, Johnny Lewis, Chris Murphy and Bruce Farthing. They would ask me, ‘Sunshine, why are you doing this to yourself?’
Somehow, don’t ask me how, I served a term on the board of the PCYC in the late 1990s. I don’t think I could have been a particularly valuable board member. Once, after a night on the bourbon, I ended up sleeping it off on an exercise mat down at the club. Next morning at about eleven, for some reason Johnny Lewis came to the club and saw me lying there unconscious still dressed in my suit and smelling of booze. He woke me gently and said sorrowfully, ‘Stevie, you’re breaking my heart.’ I tried to tell him I was all right but passed out before I could get the words out. When I sobered up, the encounter roared back into my brain, and Johnny’s despair, sad and resigned, hit me like a punch to the guts.
After a big booze binge I would return to work in a state of dread. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to function. My head would be pounding, my mouth dry, my voice a rasp, my shirt drenched with sweat. I’d want to curl up in a dark space and die but I’d try to hang in there, stand up in court, get my head around my brief because my client was counting on me, and wait for the pain to subside and the moment when I could have that next drink.
In a weird way, being a drunk came in handy at work when I was representing clients with a similar problem. Being an expert in the condition enabled me to help them. I was able to empathise with Jeff Harding when his drinking saw him face charges. I had another client who had a serious drinking problem. He knew it, I knew it, and it was destroying his life, but he was in denial. This fellow blamed everyone else for the fact that his life was in ruins. His wife, his kids, his boss, his doctor, his psychiatrist, the cops who he said had it in for him … I knew better, and gave him both barrels: ‘Mate, you have given me every reason under the sun why your life is in the toilet and you’re up on charges for the eighth time. There is one reason: alcohol. Beat that and you can survive.’
I was not capable of taking my own advice. The simple fact was that I was an alcoholic, and I couldn’t stop drinking because I didn’t want to stop. I was on the slide and I just didn’t care. I knew very well that the booze was harming my career, my relationships and my reputation. I was flirting with disaster. I drove when drunk and I got into fights in which I could have killed someone or been killed myself. I would wake up knowing that I was destroying myself and knowing that I could not call a halt to my drinking because I was enjoying it too much.
I was a barfly who would collar another drinker and say, ‘Did I ever tell you about the time when …’ in the hope of being bought a bourbon and Coke. Then, as the drink took hold, my amiable façade would fall away and I’d become a nasty drunk and my audience would get the hell out of there. I’d do anything to get a drink when I was bingeing.
Occasionally I was hospitalised after a drunken incident and put in the ward with other alcoholics. I saw my alcoholic brothers drink from a bedpan they’d convinced a visiting mate to fill with scotch to trick the nurses. I saw a man drink his own urine that he had ground sausages into from his hospital meal because he had convinced himself that the combination tasted like rum. I saw men drink perfume, embalming fluid and metho. I was a poor desperate bastard just like them.
From 1994 to 1996, I ran the bistro at the Strawberry Hills Hotel part time. That was like putting the fox in charge of the hen house. I had a good clientele of drinking mates, sports stars, journos from the News Limited building down the road, and the legal fraternity. When I was not serving up grilled octopus and veal parmigiana, the specialties of the house, I was helping myself to the contents of the fridge.
For a while, too, I left the law altogether and accepted another of James’s invitations to join him in the real estate game. He tried to get me into shape. He organised for me to work out with a professional trainer and bought me some sharp clothes. He knew I was drinking too much and this was his way of helping me. At that stage he thought all it would take for me to resolve my problems was to change my appearance. He learned that wasn’t nearly enough. I decided I’d rather drink than conform to James’s idea of how I should be, and I quit.
My relationship with my brother was always raw. When we lived together, in Woolloomooloo and later in Dangar Street and, for a short time in 1998, in Stephen Street, Randwick, he had always tried to be both parent and mate to me. He simultaneously treated me like a king and like a naughty child. At Stephen Street, my drinking was bad and getting worse, so to try to pull me into line he lectured me about how drinking would ruin my life and he checked up on me constantly, always asking where I’d been for the last four days when I arrived home on a Tuesday morning. I assured him I was fine and working hard and was not drinking. He didn’t believe me. He would confiscate my wages from my sweeping job and my law practice and put them towards our mortgage and food and living expenses. In 1997, I got $1200 for defending a guy on a drink-driving charge. James asked me how much I’d earned and I told him $600. I gave him that and got drunk and gambled away the rest.
Once, not long after James had heard of some drunken behaviour I’d got myself mixed up in, he laid down the law and told me I was on my last warning. If I got drunk and embarrassed the family name again he would boot me out. I promised him I’d change my ways. The following Friday night I rolled home legless drunk at around 8 pm. I couldn’t fit my key in the key hole in the front door. Finally, I succeeded in getting in and staggered into the lounge room. I was a smelly, incoherent, stumbling mess. Sitting on the couch were James and his girlfriend. I later learned that James had been telling her how proud he was of me for turning over a new leaf. I had let him down. His expression changed from one of shock to fury. Drunk as I was, my heart sank. He said, ‘Get out! Just get out!’ I slunk to the wardrobe, took out my one suit and a pair of shoes, a couple of ties, a shirt, my signed photo of the boxer Jake ‘ The Snake’ Rodriguez and my old boxing gloves and dumped everything else I owned in the bin, and I left.
That night I slept on the floor at my friend Dominic D’Ettorre’s place. Dom offered me his couch but I felt so low I told him thanks but I’d feel more at home on the floor. That floor was my bed for three months.
I then moved into a room at the Crest Hotel in Kings Cross. The shame of James casting me out just made me want to drink all the harder.
I cut a deal with the concierge at the Crest. He cleaned and made up my room for $300 a week. A friend who worked at the pub did me a favour and stacked my fridge with vodka and bourbon. It was paradise for a drunk like me. I had a spate of clients, and there was money from the bistro and street-sweeping. I was making money and I was out of control on the drink. Every night you could find me at the Xu bar at the top of Kings Cross near the big Coca-Cola sign. The barman there knew me and treated me like a bigshot. The Xu was a nostalgia trip for me. It used to be a barber shop, Angelo de Marco’s Hairdressing Salon, where I hung out when I was a boy. Angelo used to say, ‘Hey, Steve, if you don’t want a haircut, get off the chair.’ Now it was the barman saying, ‘Hey, Steve, if you don’t want another drink, get off the stool.’
It seemed I couldn’t go out drinking without getting into a fight. Sometimes I picked the fight, other times a rough-nut in a pub would see me lurching around and try to have a bit of fun with me. One evening I was at the Clovelly Hotel, in one of the bars there, with a girlfriend, when I saw a mate. I waved at him and shouted something in a loud, slurring voice. A bouncer was standing between us and he thought I was shouting at him. He was huge, with Arnold Schwarzenegger muscles and a shaved head. He stared holes in me. I thought, What’s he looking at? and decided that if he didn’t stop staring I’d belt him. That was how clearly I was thinking after a dozen or so drinks. I glared back at the bouncer, and mouthed an obscenity. He strode over and tried to throw me out. I told him, ‘Fuck off, or I’ll knock you right out.’ He grabbed me by the throat and lifted me 10 centimetres off the ground. I tried to break his grip and we started wrestling there in the bar. Three more bouncers ran in. One king-hit me from behind. They manhandled me out of the pub and threw me down the front steps into the street. As I was flying through the air I grabbed two and took them with me. I was punching, kicking and biting. We all fell in a heap. One bouncer pulled my jumper up over my head, a second stamped on my hands, a third kicked me, and a fourth beat the living daylights out of me.
When I was finally spent and helpless, the bald bouncer told me the cops had been called and this was my chance to run for it. I replied, ‘I’m not going anywhere, mate. I’m staying right here till the police arrive and then I’m gonna charge you bastards with assault.’ Three officers arrived and took statements from all of us and a couple of witnesses, but no charges were ever laid. My girlfriend took me straight to hospital where I was stitched and treated.
I returned to the Cloey the next week, when I’d recovered a little from my beating, to sort out the bouncer who had started the trouble. Yes, once more I’d had a few drinks. I wanted an apology. I went straight up to the bouncer and said, ‘Mate, do you remember me?’ He said he did, and that while he regretted what had happened, he had done nothing wrong and so had no reason to say sorry. I said, ‘Mate, I looked at you sideways and you and your mates bashed me. You owe me an apology for that and if I don’t get it I’ll do something about it right now.’ It got heated between us, but this time it didn’t get physical – nor did I receive my apology. Telling myself I had regained my lost honour, I left. Soon after, two detectives came around to my room at the Crest. They charged me with assaulting the bouncers.
In court the magistrate said he wanted to strip me of my licence to practise law but he’d leave that to another day. While the judgment was being handed down in the courtroom a teacher from my old school, St Mary’s, who had always told me I’d end up in jail, came into the courtroom with a group of students on an excursion. He saw me in the dock and gave me an I-told-you-so smirk.
I moved out of the Crest and lived with mates and girlfriends. I was homeless. I was a gypsy, carting my small stash of precious belongings from place to place. I was happy floating about, getting drunk, causing mayhem. I didn’t know how to live properly, because I had never been given any rules, not having parents who were in a position to impose them. I did as I pleased, and there were enough hangers-on who seemed to enjoy my company, reinforcing my bad behaviour. I didn’t dare contact James.
Drinking was always on my mind, no matter what I was doing. But I’d worn out my welcome at so many pubs and bars all over town that I found myself having to go further afield to have a drink, where they didn’t know me, and then my fighting and yahooing would get me barred from there too. I was not alone in my alcoholism. I saw heavy ceaseless drinking everywhere in that lost period. Often I would be in a pub, three sheets to the wind, and I’d hear a bloke on the phone to his wife, ‘Yeah, don’t worry, darling, I’ll be home by eight to put the kids to bed.’ And, you know, they’d still be at the bar, drinking with me, at midnight. And you know something else, I’d be there to see them falling down and getting shoved out the door at closing time because I’d be getting shoved out too. Some of my girlfriends misguidedly wanted to have children with me. Maybe they thought it would curb my wildness. I always said no. I would have been a terrible dad. At that stage of my life I would have chosen drink over the kids, just like my father did, every single time.
Working at the Strawberry Hills Hotel, I befriended Tony Hines, a long-haired, heavily tattooed, buffed and handsome thug who a few years later would be shot to death. Tony could be charming and he could be a violent psychopath. I went with him one night to the Blue Room, a slinky nightclub on Oxford Street. After the Blue Room we moved on to another club in a pub called the Freezer. Standing in the line waiting to get in, Tony picked a fight with a little red-haired bloke. The redhead refused to be intimidated by the bigger and more muscular Tony. They went to a vacant service station, stripped to the waist and fought. Tony kept knocking his adversary down and kicking him with his heavy boots, but each time the little guy climbed back to his feet and whaled away at Tony. Meanwhile, I was holding off the redhead’s mates, from time to time trading punches with a group of them. I was drunk, feeling no pain, and I could have kept it up all night. I dished out some punishment, and copped plenty for my quarter. This went on for around thirty minutes. In the end, Tony and his enemy looked at each other, grinned, shook hands and strolled off into the night with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Hostilities came to a halt between me and the four or five friends. We looked at each other, shrugged, and called it a night. We too shook hands. Just another day at the office.
For a time, after the night I couldn’t get my key in the door, James and I avoided each other. We’d speak occasionally on the phone. He obviously still cared for me and was worried sick about me. It wasn’t one single thing that destroyed our brotherly bond. It was a series of drunken incidents I’d been involved in. James for some time had been getting bombarded with calls from friends telling him what a disaster I was when I was on the grog. An accumulation of atrocities in pubs and clubs, on the streets, and in the apartment in which James had generously organised for me to stay proved to him that I was my father all over again.
In 1998, James wrote me a letter, which I have kept in my wallet to this day to remind me of how far I fell. Each time I unfold it and read it I am filled with remorse that I could have aroused such feelings of disgust in the brother I love so much.
S. Dack,
Edgecliff Rd,
Woollahra 2025.
This letter has been difficult for me to write. The amount of heartache that you have caused me has been almost unbearable. You have a major problem. I get constant reports about your attitude, aggressive behaviour, foul language, gambling, drinking, lying, not repaying money borrowed, not settling debts, spending all your money on alcohol and food and your seedy mates and then borrowing money from other people when bills come in.
I was told recently about you smoking opium at [night club] and you probably don’t even remember being there.
The neighbours in the building are shocked by your sick behaviour and complain constantly.
I don’t want to talk with you or see you any more. Do not attempt to call me or communicate with me because I don’t want you to have anything to do with my life in the future. You have had every opportunity and have failed to either respond or even thank anyone around you. You’re 34 and you need professional help. You have no respect for anybody, particularly yourself.
You are now in the same category as was your father. I will have nothing to do with you, as I had nothing to do with him. You can count on that.
In short, I am ashamed of you and you make me sick. Your mother’s memory is constantly being tarnished by your actions. Good luck for the future, you’ll need it.
PS: Don’t contact me, I warn you.
James Dack.