Horse Racing and Codeine

Alison pulled in close, I could feel her skin and the length of her muscles press up warm against my chest. She kissed me on the cheek. In my half sleep I turned my mouth towards her and kissed her hard on the mouth. She fell back asleep like that. I lay awake a while to think.

You can say what you want about tinder, I I think its great. These days it’s about the only way I ever get to meet new girls and its always a surprise. Sometimes its good, sometimes its not. No one’s ever who they say they are, and I think I like it better that way. Really I can’t see it working any other way, you have to put your best face forward or you don't get noticed. You have to sell the most attractive parts of your personality or you just don't stand out, there’s no room for flaws. There was the one girl who came over and after she’d ripped off my pants and half got me off decided it was the right time to tell me she had herpes. Then there was the stalker, and the flight attendant who was in town for one night, then there was Alison. When your parents have no money there are certain concessions you have to make, like driving six hours in a round trip after a sixty-five-hour work week to drop them home from the airport, and miss the date you set a week before. 

Alison didn’t care, she just wanted to ‘drink beers and talk s**t and fall asleep’ which is more or less what I wanted to do, so she bought a six pack and jumped in an Uber at midnight. When she got to my place I couldn’t believe it she was actually better looking in real life than in her photos, it was some sort of goddamn black magick! She was instantly taken back that I had cut my hair off, you’re not a traveller or a free spirit unless you look the part these days and to be honest I looked completely different. Its not that I was being deceptive I just hate people taking photos of me. But these things are what they are.

I could barely keep my eyes open by the time we cracked the first two tins, so I told her ‘I’m going to bed, do you want to come?’

I was up at six, Alison could barely open her eyes, I told her she could stay in bed as long as she liked. I made some coffee and eggs on toast and she came into the little kitchen for breakfast. It was raining outside and everything was cold and grey and s**t. I just wanted to get back into bed, but Blake had started calling making sure I was still coming to the races. I never enjoyed them. It is a dirty business with dirty people with dirty habits. I told Alison this as we we’re smoking cigarettes on the balcony, she just laughed at me.

‘They’re your friends though, you have to go.’

‘F**k my friends, I can’t be bothered, the weather’s s**t, I hate gambling, were all just going to end up drunk and on drugs, huddling in the rain complaining about the weather.’

She laughed and teased me a little, I let out a smile and told her it was just a morning thing. 

I was the real deal free spirited wanderluster that morning with my tired eyes and my tired attitude, and my short f*****g hair.

 

I drove Alison home and made plans to have dinner on Sunday night, called Blake and told him I wasn’t trekking to his place in Burswood, if he wanted me to come he’d have to pick me up.

I hate the races. Everybody seems to love them so much, it’s a day to get dressed up, it’s a day to spend money, a day to look the part. It’s a day to pretend. I guess all days are for pretending, but there is something so pronounced about it. Hemingway loved days at the track, even Bukowski talks about the races like you get to see real humans and real emotions, they write as if the very mask of humanity is peeled back and you can stare at its true face. But it’s all disappeared, it’s a little morsel trickled down from greater generations than our own to make people feel great again. 

I get that there used to be some magic involved, the crime and the shiftiness and the fixing and the drugging of animals and the bribes, and all the poetry mixed with the dullness of a bunch of horses run around a ring. Now days if you want to see the real die-hards all you have to do is wander into the TAB and look at those sorry f*****g morons in their old s****y shirts, faded jeans and three-day growth. One to a table staring into the screens emotionless. You can never tell if they’d won or not. All you can tell about these cuckolds is that they existed more fully inside their news paper excerpts of racing statistics and odds than they did in the real world.

 

Blake came to pick me up and shoved a beer in my hand. I popped it with my lighter, lit a smoke and we headed to pick up Alex and the girls, that was the real reason for all this. To see Alex and Lauren. There was a time when every weekend was some sort of life defining madness in some obscure part of the countryside, the first time I ever took acid was with Alex who was on some meth we thought was speed, we were seventeen and there was just no way of knowing. We stayed at a friend’s house in Nannup once when his step dad, an ex bikie chased us out of the house with his shot gun, Kim was a nice guy for the most part, but he had a volatile temper, so we spent that night in a crack den. One of the guys went to primary school with Aidan and we had no where else to go. But that’s a story for another time.

Now Alex and Lauren are parents, Alex works four and one on Barrow Island, so we only really get to see him at things like this. I hadn’t seen him for two years.

We got to Alex and Laurens house at about 10, I had already worked through three beers, and Alex put three pills in my hand. ‘Strong codeine man’ I swallowed them. I met Brooke there, she’s married to a purposeless man. A spineless gimp. She rules him but I don’t really care, she’s good fun to drink with. There was some more pre-drinking, we got back into the car to head back to Blake’s place where his new girl Kelsea was waiting, he was visibly nervous about bringing us to meet her after we’d started on the codeine, my tongue was getting looser and looser, my apprehension towards the races wasn’t going away, but I was starting to forget why I didn’t want to go, I guess there’s a difference.

 

Kelsea doesn’t drink, we found that out pretty fast. I felt sorry for her in that apartment full of strangers. Alex kept popping blisters of codeine tablets and then duramine. His supply of prescription drugs always astounds me. By the time we were ready to leave Blake’s place I was already talking fast and rambling to Lauren about Murakami novels and how I thought he was the greatest most fucked up creative mind of the century.

 

It was pretty easy to stumble into the racetrack, I just blended in with all the other drunks, and we surged through the gates. From the first steps inside everything was cheap and over-priced, the beer cups were eleven dollars and plastic, they wouldn’t have filled a schooner, the food was not even worth looking at, everyone was dressed in the cheapest, best clothing they could afford for the day, and it was raining.

 

We all went straight to the bar, I drank three beers in the first little beer garden and then I had to go find an ATM. The pavilion was filled with morons. I got my money and went back out onto the grass to find the others. I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t interested in the races, in fact, to me, no one seemed interested at all, no one was paying attention to anything that was going on. In the great Western Australian tradition, it was just another excuse to get drunk. I don’t know why that made me feel better about the whole thing but it did. 

Almost every half hour on the dot Alex would pop three more blisters into my hand and I enjoyed the feeling of the codeine mellowing out the duramine and it all mixing together with the alcohol. I was on my second pack of cigarettes by the time all the others came in for Sam’s birthday. Apparently we were there to celebrate the birthday of Sam who I’d never met, I didn’t care I said happy birthday and gave her a hug, one of those overly sincere hugs you give where you’re fucked up. I mostly talked with Alex and Blake about all the stuff we used to do as teenagers, we watched a group of mullets trying to pick fights with guys in suits and cheered them on from a distance. I saw two or three girls squat pissing in their elegant flower dresses up against walls where they thought no one could see, I didn’t see any of them get kicked out though. Brooke gave me a champagne flute and asked if I wanted a pill. I said yes without really thinking, we dropped the pills into the sparkling wine and toasted to the good old days. Waiting for the come up is in its own way a kind of introspective foreplay, you’re sitting there chatting away while in the back of your mind there is this creeping feeling, ‘is it going to work, did I get ripped off, do I need to s**t? I think I do, f**k I have to take a s**t.’ BANG. It hits you, you don’t need to s**t, but you don’t exactly not need to either. Blake had done the standard bail without telling anyone and as things began to wind up at our little table, two suits walked over to the table and started talking to Lauren and Brooke. Alex isn’t the kind of guy to care about something like that, but he is the kind of guy whose mood can flip like a switch when he’s drunk enough, and I could see he was starting to ping like me.

‘Have some chips mate.’ He thrust the nearly empty platter towards the two guys.

‘It’s alright mate, I don’t want any.’

‘No, have some chips.’

The guy started to walk away, three of his friends came over.

‘Do you want a chip!’ this guy was a head taller than me, he looked down his nose at Alex who was waving the platter around like a sword or a d***o and didn’t even say anything before turning around.

I grabbed the back of his neck so hard it felt like I coulda lifted him right off the ground and dragged him out into an empty patch of grass.

‘F**k off man, were not fighting these guys, I’m not getting my a*s kicked again just cause you’re being a c**t.’

‘I was just offering him a chip.’

‘Don’t be a c**t Alex.’

‘F**k alright.’

He popped three more blisters into my hand I slapped him on the back.

‘Good to see  you again man, it’s been way too long.’

‘Yeah man, I know. we gotta do this more often.’

We walked back and I lifted up my eyes over the crowd of floral dresses and saw the horses racing. Running by. Men and women screaming and cheering them on, the excitement of all the punters building into a mass climax. Then it was over, they were out of sight. I caught a four second glimpse, it was every bit as impotent as I remembered.

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Alison pulled in close, I could feel her skin and the length of her muscles press up warm against my chest. She kissed me on the cheek. In my half sleep I turned my mouth towards her and kissed her hard on the mouth. She fell back asleep like that. I lay awake a while to think.

You can say what you want about tinder, I I think its great. These days it’s about the only way I ever get to meet new girls and its always a surprise. Sometimes its good, sometimes its not. No one’s ever who they say they are, and I think I like it better that way. Really I can’t see it working any other way, you have to put your best face forward or you don't get noticed. You have to sell the most attractive parts of your personality or you just don't stand out, there’s no room for flaws. There was the one girl who came over and after she’d ripped off my pants and half got me off decided it was the right time to tell me she had herpes. Then there was the stalker, and the flight attendant who was in town for one night, then there was Alison. When your parents have no money there are certain concessions you have to make, like driving six hours in a round trip after a sixty-five-hour work week to drop them home from the airport, and miss the date you set a week before.

Alison didn’t care, she just wanted to ‘drink beers and talk s**t and fall asleep’ which is more or less what I wanted to do, so she bought a six pack and jumped in an Uber at midnight. When she got to my place I couldn’t believe it she was actually better looking in real life than in her photos, it was some sort of goddamn black magick! She was instantly taken back that I had cut my hair off, you’re not a traveller or a free spirit unless you look the part these days and to be honest I looked completely different. Its not that I was being deceptive I just hate people taking photos of me. But these things are what they are.
I could barely keep my eyes open by the time we cracked the first two tins, so I told her ‘I’m going to bed, do you want to come?’

I was up at six, Alison could barely open her eyes, I told her she could stay in bed as long as she liked. I made some coffee and eggs on toast and she came into the little kitchen for breakfast. It was raining outside and everything was cold and grey and s**t. I just wanted to get back into bed, but Blake had started calling making sure I was still coming to the races. I never enjoyed them. It is a dirty business with dirty people with dirty habits. I told Alison this as we we’re smoking cigarettes on the balcony, she just laughed at me.
‘They’re your friends though, you have to go.’
‘F**k my friends, I can’t be bothered, the weather’s s**t, I hate gambling, were all just going to end up drunk and on drugs, huddling in the rain complaining about the weather.’
She laughed and teased me a little, I let out a smile and told her it was just a morning thing.
I was the real deal free spirited wanderluster that morning with my tired eyes and my tired attitude, and my short f*****g hair.

I drove Alison home and made plans to have dinner on Sunday night, called Blake and told him I wasn’t trekking to his place in Burswood, if he wanted me to come he’d have to pick me up.
I hate the races. Everybody seems to love them so much, it’s a day to get dressed up, it’s a day to spend money, a day to look the part. It’s a day to pretend. I guess all days are for pretending, but there is something so pronounced about it. Hemingway loved days at the track, even Bukowski talks about the races like you get to see real humans and real emotions, they write as if the very mask of humanity is peeled back and you can stare at its true face. But it’s all disappeared, it’s a little morsel trickled down from greater generations than our own to make people feel great again.

I get that there used to be some magic involved, the crime and the shiftiness and the fixing and the drugging of animals and the bribes, and all the poetry mixed with the dullness of a bunch of horses run around a ring. Now days if you want to see the real die-hards all you have to do is wander into the TAB and look at those sorry f*****g morons in their old s****y shirts, faded jeans and three-day growth. One to a table staring into the screens emotionless. You can never tell if they’d won or not. All you can tell about these cuckolds is that they existed more fully inside their news paper excerpts of racing statistics and odds than they did in the real world.

Blake came to pick me up and shoved a beer in my hand. I popped it with my lighter, lit a smoke and we headed to pick up Alex and the girls, that was the real reason for all this. To see Alex and Lauren. There was a time when every weekend was some sort of life defining madness in some obscure part of the countryside, the first time I ever took acid was with Alex who was on some meth we thought was speed, we were seventeen and there was just no way of knowing. We stayed at a friend’s house in Nannup once when his step dad, an ex bikie chased us out of the house with his shot gun, Kim was a nice guy for the most part, but he had a volatile temper, so we spent that night in a crack den. One of the guys went to primary school with Aidan and we had no where else to go. But that’s a story for another time.

Now Alex and Lauren are parents, Alex works four and one on Barrow Island, so we only really get to see him at things like this. I hadn’t seen him for two years.
We got to Alex and Laurens house at about 10, I had already worked through three beers, and Alex put three pills in my hand. ‘Strong codeine man’ I swallowed them. I met Brooke there, she’s married to a purposeless man. A spineless gimp. She rules him but I don’t really care, she’s good fun to drink with. There was some more pre-drinking, we got back into the car to head back to Blake’s place where his new girl Kelsea was waiting, he was visibly nervous about bringing us to meet her after we’d started on the codeine, my tongue was getting looser and looser, my apprehension towards the races wasn’t going away, but I was starting to forget why I didn’t want to go, I guess there’s a difference.

Kelsea doesn’t drink, we found that out pretty fast. I felt sorry for her in that apartment full of strangers. Alex kept popping blisters of codeine tablets and then duramine. His supply of prescription drugs always astounds me. By the time we were ready to leave Blake’s place I was already talking fast and rambling to Lauren about Murakami novels and how I thought he was the greatest most fucked up creative mind of the century.

It was pretty easy to stumble into the racetrack, I just blended in with all the other drunks, and we surged through the gates. From the first steps inside everything was cheap and over-priced, the beer cups were eleven dollars and plastic, they wouldn’t have filled a schooner, the food was not even worth looking at, everyone was dressed in the cheapest, best clothing they could afford for the day, and it was raining.

We all went straight to the bar, I drank three beers in the first little beer garden and then I had to go find an ATM. The pavilion was filled with morons. I got my money and went back out onto the grass to find the others. I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t interested in the races, in fact, to me, no one seemed interested at all, no one was paying attention to anything that was going on. In the great Western Australian tradition, it was just another excuse to get drunk. I don’t know why that made me feel better about the whole thing but it did.

Almost every half hour on the dot Alex would pop three more blisters into my hand and I enjoyed the feeling of the codeine mellowing out the duramine and it all mixing together with the alcohol. I was on my second pack of cigarettes by the time all the others came in for Sam’s birthday. Apparently we were there to celebrate the birthday of Sam who I’d never met, I didn’t care I said happy birthday and gave her a hug, one of those overly sincere hugs you give where you’re fucked up. I mostly talked with Alex and Blake about all the stuff we used to do as teenagers, we watched a group of mullets trying to pick fights with guys in suits and cheered them on from a distance. I saw two or three girls squat pissing in their elegant flower dresses up against walls where they thought no one could see, I didn’t see any of them get kicked out though. Brooke gave me a champagne flute and asked if I wanted a pill. I said yes without really thinking, we dropped the pills into the sparkling wine and toasted to the good old days. Waiting for the come up is in its own way a kind of introspective foreplay, you’re sitting there chatting away while in the back of your mind there is this creeping feeling, ‘is it going to work, did I get ripped off, do I need to s**t? I think I do, f**k I have to take a s**t.’ BANG. It hits you, you don’t need to s**t, but you don’t exactly not need to either. Blake had done the standard bail without telling anyone and as things began to wind up at our little table, two suits walked over to the table and started talking to Lauren and Brooke. Alex isn’t the kind of guy to care about something like that, but he is the kind of guy whose mood can flip like a switch when he’s drunk enough, and I could see he was starting to ping like me.
‘Have some chips mate.’ He thrust the nearly empty platter towards the two guys.
‘It’s alright mate, I don’t want any.’
‘No, have some chips.’
The guy started to walk away, three of his friends came over.
‘Do you want a chip!’ this guy was a head taller than me, he looked down his nose at Alex who was waving the platter around like a sword or a d***o and didn’t even say anything before turning around.
I grabbed the back of his neck so hard it felt like I coulda lifted him right off the ground and dragged him out into an empty patch of grass.
‘F**k off man, were not fighting these guys, I’m not getting my a*s kicked again just cause you’re being a c**t.’
‘I was just offering him a chip.’
‘Don’t be a c**t Alex.’
‘F**k alright.’

He popped three more blisters into my hand I slapped him on the back.

‘Good to see you again man, it’s been way too long.’
‘Yeah man, I know. we gotta do this more often.’

We walked back and I lifted up my eyes over the crowd of floral dresses and saw the horses racing. Running by. Men and women screaming and cheering them on, the excitement of all the punters building into a mass climax. Then it was over, they were out of sight. I caught a four second glimpse, it was every bit as impotent as I remembered.i like it