Out of Bounds

The concept of tolerance is a magical one. In a certain sense, it means acceptance and growth. It can also mean capacity - a limit. But it is never enthusiastic in these ventures.

And there is always hidden within this idea, a threshold looming, beyond which balance is easily overthrown. Tolerance cannot stand up to most things for too long. It always fails. This piece is an examination of our human systems (circulatory or otherwise) almost unceasing struggle to tolerate toxins. Anything from ammonia, baby formula, sugar or heroin to power, money, abuse and devastation.

Speaking of thresholds and boundaries, I spent a few days in Kings Cross with Patrick McKenzie, transgressing them. Patrick is an archivist, a writer, and an educator. He is also an ex-addict. He spent a lot of time from the 80’s to the 10’s on both sides of a habit (counsellor/user) in the place we all affectionately refer to as ‘The Cross’.

Patrick’s Kings Cross: Sydney’s unlikely frontier of hedonism and love objects. Full of sex, substances, pointy detritus, idling cars and throbbing neon, ended a while ago. It was drawn and quartered but not in the town square, instead, it died a red death in front of the Coca-Cola sign. It began to perish with the Wood Royal Commission and the introduction of lock-out laws. It started as a convenient party location for G.I’s docking in the harbour to drown out the sulfuric smell of burning skin and Agent Orange from Vietnam. It was all shoe polish, Go-Go girls and the twist.

Enter: drugs. Much like the horny G.I’s, also from South-East Asia.

Drugs go well in these dark, red places: the punctured vein, the nostril, the cavity.

There are few things as formless as Kings Cross. Technically it is nothing but a psychic perimeter that spans a few streets (generously speaking). The specifics on which streets, and where, changes depending on who you ask. Nobody lives in Kings Cross anymore. They live in Potts Point, Darlinghurst or Wolloomooloo. It is not a suburb. And not only is it not a suburb, but it was originally called Queens Cross - a namesake that only lasted for eight years. So from where we are standing now, this fairyland is a bastardised, make-believe middle earth, against which a strong argument could be made for non-existence.

The following words I’ve written are drawn from Patrick’s testimonials of the tangible Cross, its capacity and its temperament - Therefore its tolerance - which you will find to be highly conflicting.

You can’t write a story about addiction or the Cross that doesn’t change its mind at the last minute or contradict itself. Since I’m writing about both, if I were to provide a coherent, didactic story about moral victory and the conquest of temptation, it would, in fact, be the least appropriate thing I could do.

***

“It was a den of inequity and vice”

We were standing on the corner of Orwell street and Hughes lane, looking at a monstrously unscathed, pallid, rendered facade. A heinous renovation, which bore no evidence of wear or activity, no scratches or stains. Massive evidence, however, of a terminal case of colour blindness- the only plausible explanation for its despicable beige colour palette.

This building was the ‘Venus Room’. Renowned for its parties, drugs and assaults. The usual bastions of justice didn’t apply here. Or anywhere back then, apparently. The whole area was seemingly impervious to any real discipline. A different kind of integrity was upheld. The feudal system of the Cross is a dynamic that people love to watch over-produced shows about and salivate over. I get it. Deep down we all find violence enchanting. The animal dream of our age: embracing taboo and rejecting propriety. Living life out of bounds.

Submitting to base instincts, listening to that voice inside of us that says go for it! Indulge! Yes, you can sell all your belongings and drive on the wrong side of the highway, really fast. Of course you don’t need a seatbelt, they kill more people than they save anyway. Yeah, taxes are optional. Let’s murder the man who followed your friend for a few blocks that one night. No, it’s not a bad idea to steal that balding parking officer’s cowboy hat and run. They should never have given all those bloated narcs the title of ‘ranger’ in the first place.

Annihilate that voice inside of you that counters timidly - what about my flowerpot, my ceiling, my bank account, my timeshare, my health? That dork never has any fun anyway.

It’s easy to have an exalted view of the dysfunctional life, of the outlaw. In my experience, they are not so much unshackled by societal agreement, but enslaved by survival and warped power structures. In Patrick’s experience, it was difficult to maintain a reverence for the outlaws once they started having it out for him. We cannot be too romantic about these things.

The current optics of King’s Cross make it seem like a glorified carousel ride of explosive drug tycoon power-grabs and alleyway bashings. That isn’t entirely true.

At the top of the hierarchy were the apex predators, Patrick named Saffron and Rogerson, among others who are still alive, and won’t be named. Kissing their feet, stand-over men, cops, suppliers and politicians (even now the distinction between these titles is precarious at best).

There is a story about a woman who saw something she shouldn’t have, and the payout involved cops, the Lido Hotel, dogfood and free-pouring methadone.

There is a story about another woman who said something she shouldn’t have. In front of thousands on 60 Minutes. She was an intellectual and an activist, a sex worker and an addict. She took down the entire upper ranks of this system in one beautiful, singular interview. She ultimately paid a price for this and I take a minute for her every time I circle Busby Pond in Centennial Park. Her name is Sally-Anne Huckstepp.

Addicts exist at the very bottom of this power structure. The real ones. The ones who spend their entire lives in the pursuit and consumption of drugs. Without them, the whole ecosystem collapses. But there were exceptions to this rule. If you hit your limit and wanted out, you had two options: Dash or Detox.

Patrick smiled at me when I asked what ‘Dash’ meant. ‘Dash’ is a quality embodied by individuals who, using methods of manipulation unknown to me, scale this hierarchy. A person with dash has to be a naturally opportunistic, charming, intuitive participant in the game. They must have the capacity to utilise violence and other forms of leverage with ease. To ‘Dash’ is to lean in. Many do so at their own peril.

I’m writing this in April, which means that exactly thirty-seven years ago, in a pawn shop on William street, Patrick was fated to be arrested.

Cops would often monitor the influx and yields of these hock shops to link items back to break-and-enters. Especially break-and-enters that might have occurred in Rose Bay. Patrick wasn’t aware they were onto him that day - because they weren’t. He truly just skipped into the shop with two large bags in tow, one full of camera gear, the other; leather jackets. And the fact that two beat cops happened to be window shopping was a coincidence. What at the time would have felt like a cosmically unfortunate chain of events, actually led Patrick towards recovery. Six days in a brutalist cell in Surry Hills with the lights on 24/7 is a cruel but effective way to dry out.

An old proverb goes like this: A fool who knows he is a fool, is not a good fool. From what I can understand, Patrick was never good at being a fool. A perfect fool would have marched out of that police station and given everything over to drugs. A perfect fool might have died soon after. But Patrick, being the bad fool, committed himself entirely to recovery, and then community. It is not a direct and unswerving story, Patrick certainly relapsed a few times, the most recent of which was 11 years ago.

Community leads us squarely to the other exit: Detox.

Kirketon Road Centre sits atop the fire station, first opened in ‘87 as an approachable frontline centre where social and medical counselling services could reach the people who needed it most. Methadone, syringe exchange, and sexual health programs came from this institution as a reaction to the AIDS crisis and the ongoing drug epidemic. There is a term I’ve always liked: ‘Harm Reduction.’ It is close to a cosmic view of things, which is the view I prefer. Harm is guaranteed. Many of us will know it at some point in our lives. I really think it is a valiant and profound thing to intervene in systems that have high levels of collateral damage.

‘Harm Reduction’ is better than tolerance. Tolerance doesn’t like drugs in its doorways or bodies in its alleyways. Tolerance tells you addiction is something that affects the weak. ‘Harm Reduction’ requires an acceptance of the fact that the common good is not very, and that there is indeed such a thing as getting carried away with feeling okay.

Both Detox and Dash are ambitious and potentially lethal exit strategies. They require a fantasist to succeed. After working at KRC for a couple of years, Patrick’s using crept up on him once more, and he had to leave and start over again.

I wish I had something interesting to say about this. I have so much more to say. There’s nothing like writing about a topic important to you, to make you feel like your words are the fumbling remnants of a once-precise mind that is being slowly swisse-cheesed by lack of sleep and drug use. They say in war ineloquence is best. I also hear that there is a ‘war on drugs’. Here is my suitably ineloquent epitaph for Patrick’s Kings Cross, and the years of his life he cannot retrieve from it.

All that Uncle Murdoch propaganda about society and increasing crime rates and nobody tells it like this: Society is doing crime. Doing society is a violent crime. And most interestingly, society is rampant in crime. We, humans, conglomerate and move in units and families, we organise ourselves without really knowing why. Community is organic and very close to us. Corners belonged to certain sex workers, clubs to fetish, blocks to vice. A sophisticated level of symbiosis can dominate even the most nefarious and hedonistic “dens of inequity and vice”. And from it all- sanctuary. KRC and other outreach programs still somehow prevail. The implications of those initial desperate efforts to help one another can still be felt all around us. This puts me at home in my species. We can’t ever really leave ourselves alone. We can try. But it never works out.

Story - the remnants of place. The tale. This is important. Patrick’s Cross is of course contaminated by memory, unclean and swept with nostalgia. But he dedicates himself to the preservation and sharing of anecdotes and resources - and makes a witness out of all of us in doing so. You can look at his work here. He told me about so many things, from the cadaverous casualties of the AIDS crisis to prototype Rajneeshi MDMA.

Now, AIDS, an epidemic that wiped out at least 20,000 Australians in a single decade, can be avoided with a pill. And Rajneeshis are just some weirdos who wore orange. And MDMA is something I can have in front of me within the hour.

In Patrick’s Kings Cross, the prime minister cried on television discussing his daughter's heroin addiction. Just last week, the Victorian government rejected a safe injecting room in Melbourne despite a report pushing for the facility. It also happens to be the Cross’s injection centre’s 23rd birthday right now. It has treated 11,000 overdoses with zero fatalities.

In a very real way, our Kings Cross is an example of exploitation carried to its logical conclusion: A world-class rental crisis, designer bags and a pack of wage slaves. These extinction events can creep up on us if we don’t pay attention.

If you want to know what was, is and is coming - look to the Cross. The brothels, clubs and gambling houses are all backpackers, Harris Farms, Nobirds, charcoal chicken and vape stores. But the sandstone has not yet been baked of its demons, and there is still harm to be reduced.