(15 Years in Long Sleeves - #2) Not Looking Too Good, But Feeling Real Well

Life was good, it was 20 years since Sergeant Pepper had taught the band to play and I'd managed to keep my shit together and stay off the smack long enough to get accepted into The Academy of Performing Arts. Suddenly I was in a tertiary institution and for the first time in my life I was thinking of my future.

I was living as care-taker in Tom Collins House before Servetus Street took steroids and swallowed the houses on the southern side of the road. The house was amazing, strewn with cabinets full of Australian first editions and furniture built by Joseph Furphy with a surreal brass rubbing by his daughter Mattie over the fire place. My duties were few: hosting the monthly meetings of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, serving cups of tea in Wembley Ware, and just being awed at my fucken arsey luck. Somehow I had landed on my size elevens yet again.

But of course there was no way that I was going to be able to keep this up for too long as there was a new drug in town. A cheap, pure powder that when hit was like riding the fucken space shuttle. But such is life for the hero of these stories, our spunky young journeyman drug addict.

(To be continued?)