didn't i
vinny bombora
Standing before the television crew is a young, fresh faced presenter for a twenty four hour music station. He’s live on air talking about the latest clip from the new pop starlet.
Terry runs up, grabs the microphone from the presenter’s hand and screams into the camera.
“Ah play some Coldplay, alright,” in his Bristol accent.
The presenter grabs the microphone back as Terry moves off to the side.
He says to the audience, “Sorry about that thug.”
He got it right… Terry was quite the thug.
Although from the start he didn’t seem so.
On his first night round ours, Damo brought him, Terry sat by as people ran about dropping eccies, knocking over bottles and getting into yelling matches. Terry hardly spoke a word. It got to the point where Sue, my girl, actually went up to him at the end of the night to apologise. That was before the apologies started coming in the other direction.
He began crashing over on Friday and Saturday night as he lived further out, near the beach. Then he started dropping in on Thursday and staying til Tuesday. Eventually it got to the point where there was no reason for him to return home and he lived on the couch.
He was working at a school, installing something, and he started arriving home with different spoils - food, books, watches - that he’d been stealing out of the students’ lockers. It wasn’t like I was morally put out by his theft but somehow it just didn’t seem to gel with his butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth approach.
Everyone living in the terrace was loaded most of the time and the place was a drop in for druggies what with Cindy dealing out of her room. Yet it turned out that Terry was a full blown, long term heroin addict back home. We found out when he proudly revealed a letter that his doctor back in the UK had written for him before he left.
It was evidently his pass to visit any practitioner and get himself some synthetic opiates. Damo’s ears pricked up when he heard. Damo was a chipper: a dabbler in smack. When Terry turned up at the surgeries it turned out that none of the doctors were having a bar of it.
Terry and Damo did show up at the house one afternoon with a large bottle of liquid methadone and about twenty packets of the drug in pill form. The place filled with such a buzz, a pill popping orgy, that nobody stopped to question where it all came from. No quack was going to hand over those amounts. Didn’t matter though, a damn fine time was had.
Damo had dibs on the bottle of methadone and spent a full week sitting on the couch completely gone. Occasionally you might walk down stairs and catch him on his way back from the fridge after taking a swig. He’d be in the hallway hovering, blissfully unaware that you were even there.
Terry and Damo decided to bring the real deal home; it was my first junkies’ tea party. We were all sitting around in the living room. Terry hit his main vein; at the spot where he had a permanent puncture mark that he wore with pride. As he pulled the spike out and dropped it to the ground he went straight on the nod.
It freaked me.
“Terry, hey Terry.”
“Huh, what,” he looked up, “What, what’s that Vinny?”
I realised he was fine; in that space where he’d resided.
“Ah nothing Terry… really nothing.”
He’d been using since his mid-teens, off and on. Of late back home he’d broken up with his girl. She’d gotten together ‘with a real muppet’ and it screwed with Terry’s head. He was not a happy boy.
His mother had seen these adverts on the TV for cheap flights over. So she sat on her bed all day waiting on hold for the operator so she could book a ticket out for her boy. She could see a storm brewing and wanted to divert it.
I was lying on Cindy’s bed, running a fever, could hardly move and was in her room for some company. It was a wonder we weren’t all permanently laid out, I mean the amount of substances we were shoving into our systems.
Terry came in. He’d made me these two bread rolls with coleslaw and cheese. Touched… I was totally touched to have such a sinister soul taking care of me.
“Here you go Vinny, get that into you. You’ve got to get better.”
As I picked up one of the rolls and began to eat, Terry told me a story.
“Yeah Vinny, I was inside for a while. Got into a spot of trouble, didn’t I.
There was this time I was on my way to do over this clothing warehouse with my mate Sammy. Was Sammy’s idea. He’s this big guy about town and gets up to all sorts of things.
We had to stop on the way to get some petrol. Sammy’s filling up the car and I’m standing there.
Across the road there’s this tosser Adam Thompson. He’s thinking he’s something… standing there with these three girls. He’s pointing, saying something, laughing. All the girls are laughing. It weren’t right Vinny, it just weren’t right.
So I picked up the steering lock, walked over and smashed him over the head. He fell to the ground and I kept clocking him.
I mean it weren’t right, laughing with all those girls.
I had to go away for six months for that.”
Sue and I decided to head to the rainy city. It was time to get out: too many amphetamines, too many druggies and Terry and Damo were full blown by this stage.
After a thirty six hour binge, Sue and I went to get into the car for the drive down. Terry came out with this huge box that he’d wrapped: a going away present for me. I pulled off the paper, opened it and inside was a machete. A poignant gift; I placed it under the passenger seat.
The phone rang early on a Saturday morn, it was Terry raving after a big night. He’d finally secured a room in the terrace and was off the couch.
The room had been vacated by Dave, the only straight guy in the house. I never understood how this guy could enter the living room filled with people completely wrecked and not notice. He never hung out that much though; he wasn’t welcome.
“I saw Dave up near the shopping mall and he wanted his bond money. I still haven’t given it to him.
I pointed to the mark on my arm and told him that it’d all gone up there, didn't I.
Then I pulled a knife and chased him through the car park. Didn’t he run.
I mean what else could I do Vinny,” he cackled.
As I cracked up into the mouthpiece I had to admit there was nothing else to do. I’d never been a fan of Dave’s.
It was a few weeks later when Cindy called upset. Terry had been up the pub when one of her customers was looking to buy some tabs. Terry told him he could help out, so the guy gave him $700. Terry walked off with the bread and never went back.
The rest of the house were in an outrage. It just wasn’t good form. What about the retribution that could come Cindy’s way?
The last time Terry called was on a Sunday afternoon. He’d gone up north and was living with some woman and her kids. He seemed lonely. He was worried that he was going to be chucked out of the country, his visa was coming to an end. He didn’t want to go home; there was nothing there for him. None of those guys ever wanted to go home.
He spoke to me and then Sue. During the conversation he asked whether he could come down and stay for a while. I quickly changed the subject and turned out so did Sue.
We didn’t answer the phone too often after that.
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