Low Life in the High Desert Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  FOREWORD

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

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  29

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  33

  AFTERWORD

  LOW LIFE IN THE HIGH DESERT

  David Hirst was an Australian journalist, documentary filmmaker, and author of Heroin in Australia. A great love of the American West took him to California and ultimately to a life in the Eastern Mojave Desert. Upon returning to Australia, his prescient and revolutionary finance column, ‘Planet Wall Street’, was widely read in The Age newspaper. David died in 2013.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria, Australia 3056

  3754 Pleasant Ave, Suite 100, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55409 USA

  First published by Scribe 2018

  Text copyright © Estate of David Hirst 2018

  Foreword and afterword copyright © Valerie Morton 2018

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  9781925713282 (Australian edition)

  9781947534315 (US edition)

  9781925693263 (e-book)

  A CiP entry for this title is available from the National Library of Australia.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.com

  For my brothers, Peter and George

  FOREWORD

  by Valerie Morton

  Recently I picked up a large box that had been mailed to me from California. Inside was something precious: a dearly departed friend’s hat. It was Buzz Gamble’s dress Stetson, the one we had filmed him wearing at his son’s wedding. Buzz had spent most of his life in the US’s worst prisons, including the notorious Huntsville, home of Old Smokey, but when he opened his mouth and sang the blues, this west Texan could heal the most crushed heart.

  The first time we heard Buzz sing was in Pappy and Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace, a rough saloon in California’s Eastern Mojave Desert. Most people were intimidated on first encountering Buzz — his scars, faded old prison tatts, and a voice that sounded like he’d been gargling rocks. David bought him a Kessler, and they disappeared into the beer garden where the other wild men of the desert were gathering to check out the shooting stars and discuss important matters of state.

  ‘You are one crazy motherfuckin’ Australian,’ Buzz concluded, as David told the tale of us moving from Sydney to Los Angeles to the assembled company. ‘You oughta come and live out here.’

  It took a while, but we eventually did, moving into a house that clearly only crazy Australians would take on. Hidden away at the end of a canyon, fifteen miles from Pioneertown, population a few hundred, it was the closest we were ever going to get to living in the authentic Wild West — without the hangings.

  Since he’d been a kid in the Australian bush, David had been obsessed with the American West. Other than politics and history, the books he read were Westerns, old dime pulp fiction, with titles like Blacksnake Trail and Write His Name in Gunsmoke. We had hundreds of them. So as the clock ticked over into the new millennium, we stepped back into the 1800s, to a landscape not only straight out of a Western, but where the Westerns had been filmed, before Gene Autry and the Cisco Kid rode off into the sunset.

  For six years, from 2000 to 2006, we made our home amidst the neighbouring tough men and tougher women, and the ghosts of Gram Parsons and Mojave Indians. High up in Boulder House, overlooking the sweep of the High Desert and its massive rock formations, David began writing about our life in this twilight zone. Had he lived to finish the book, he would have had the sad task of recording the many deaths of our friends, including Buzz’s. Instead, he went off to join those old cowboys, wherever they went when they walked through the batwings for the last time. I choose to think that somewhere in heaven, or the great corral in the sky, there is a bar where they are all huddled around an avocado-wood fire, telling the old stories and listening to Buzz sing ‘Trouble in Mind’ one more time.

  1

  I have absolutely nothing against the smoking of cocaine, and might have done it myself at some stage in my life if I knew how. I do object to the smell it makes. It’s a foul smell, and as the process of cutting and reformulating the stuff involves the use of chemicals, not to mention kerosene, it is not something to start the day with. But the old houses of Venice, California, in the years when gentrification was just taking hold, were pressed together. In keeping with the new type on the block, we had the misfortune to have a new, rich, white, and psychotic neighbour who seemed to need crack cocaine with the intensity of those who care for napalm first thing in the mornings.

  With my girlfriend, Boo, I had taken a house on one of the pretty little walkways a few blocks from Venice Beach partly to get the air before the rest of Los Angeles, and an acrid opening to the morning before dawn had bothered to break was beginning to unsettle us.

  Venice, before its hostile takeover by Hollywood executives and dot-communaires — and later the bankster class — was a delight. The canals were putrid, cholera had been detected in the sand, and the surf was deplorable. Young men paddled around trying to catch a wave the size of a large hand. I was astonished that songs could be written about Southern Californian beaches, and presumed The Beach Boys had plenty of time to record their surfing music because of the absence of surf. Had they lived near an Australian beach, the world would have forever been deprived of their sound.

  In Venice, we had some eminent gangs. Extremely active ones. Two black and one Latino. Crack cocaine could be bought at most stop signs, and the bars were awash with powder.

  Our neighbour, the crack smoker, was a deeply troubled soul whom Boo had dubbed ‘The Man with No Brain’. Though filthy rich, he was a poor neighbour. His backyard gleamed with classic Firebirds from the sixties. He rarely drove them, but had them washed and polished by long-suffering Latino folk every other day. He had taken to driving a stretch limousine even though he was its only occupant, unless he happened upon some unfortunate young man to bring home to his fortified dwelling in our otherwise quiet lane. He might have been handsome once, but had become bloated as a result, I imagined, of the use of lithium.

  John, our neighbour on our other side, did not suffer as badly from the first breath of dawn, but objected to his baby being woken by the putrid air each morning. An extremely muscular black schoolteacher who had married a white schoolteacher, John, like most folks, was deeply protective of his small clan, as I tried to be of mine. But the border war with Brainless, as he was by now widely known, soon escalated to include most of the block, and we all discussed what might be done to rid the air of this pestilence.

  The police were not interested, and in those days were known to voice the opinion that people who lived in Venice deserved what they got.
The cops lived in indescribably boring places — white enclaves like Simi Valley — and did not have to coexist with a lunatic whose house was separated from theirs by three very short feet. Thirty-six inches. They did not see him screaming at their fence, still clad in his pyjamas at six in the afternoon, with a dry white film about his mouth.

  John, being a schoolteacher in Los Angeles, knew a lot about how dangerous life can get, and began suggesting that we make a formal approach to the police after Brainless took a sledgehammer to my ’67 Red Mustang with white racing stripes. I declined. I had no proof that he had done it, and I was closer to him than John. I knew how crazy he was, and I didn’t want to make him any madder. And I doubted the police would move against him. He was white and very rich. The police had found cause to take him into custody in the past, but an indulgent mother in Brentwood always had him bailed out and back home in time for his pre-dawn smoke. Lawyers would handle things thereafter, and he would puff away after these encounters as though enlivened, and without an apparent worry in the world. I had to worry about the safety of Boo and my springer spaniel, Harry.

  When he finally built a bomb, and hurled it at the door of the apartment behind John’s, almost incinerating the woman who lived there, the police became more concerned. They called a ‘community meeting’, and we gathered in John’s living room to discuss the threat from the west.

  As I was the closest combatant, I was asked first what should be done.

  ‘You should put him in jail,’ I told the cops.

  The residents who had gathered nodded, and looked expectantly at the three officers sent to calm an increasingly troubled community. But the terrified neighbour who had been firebombed had left in a hurry, and failed to file a complaint. She could not be located.

  Jailing Brainless, the senior LAPD officers gathered before us explained, was not possible at this stage. The courts were cluttered, and the wheels of justice were unlikely to move him towards a cell any time soon. In other words, the man had money behind him. I could not prove he had crushed the side of the Mustang, and smoking cocaine at sun-up was not a serious-enough offence to bother the courts, unless one was black and poor, and Brainless was neither. His other offences would be erased with the stroke of his mother’s hand across her chequebook. In fact, the city of Los Angeles was making good money from the antics of The Man with No Brain. It was, as they say, a no-brainer.

  The officer in charge, aware of his civic responsibilities and the increasingly unruly fury that attended his denial of our civic rights, took an upbeat view of things and cheerfully suggested that I, as his closest neighbour, shoot him.

  ‘You shoot him,’ I replied. ‘You’re the cops.’

  The senior cop explained the difficulties they faced in shooting a white man with a rich mother, though they didn’t say that precisely. However, he pointed out in a kindly fashion that, if Brainless were to be shot, and if I could ensure that his body was on our property by the time he or a colleague arrived, all would go well for me. He would personally testify to the threat posed by this lunatic, and jail would be out of the question.

  ‘I don’t have a gun!’ I exclaimed.

  John, our communal host, sped to his cabinet and uncovered a good deal of weaponry: a shotgun, an automatic rifle, a super-powerful bow with high-tech arrows, and some handguns. He offered me a Colt .45. The cops, with their boyish crewcuts, nodded earnestly, and my neighbours beamed with approval.

  Though 99 per cent sure the cops would be as good as their word, I demurred, reminding them that shooting the Man with No Brain was their job, pure and simple. To the chagrin of cops and neighbours, I brushed away John’s shooter and returned to our endangered cottage. I didn’t want to mess with any bodies. Bodies were what I had come to California to get away from.

  2

  There had been a lot of murders. First, it was Danny Chubb. Hardly a soul in Sydney knew Danny existed until he ceased to exist, but the manner in which he left life gave him — in passing — some status. Danny left life in unusually public fashion. Shot dead, gunned down if you like, in the street. Right in front of his mum’s home. And no attempt to clean up the mess. It was an ill wind, and a harbinger of a tempest of death. A vital convention had been broken — removing and disposing of the body. That should have told us something. Danny Chubb was, like any man who carried such a numbing name, small fry. But as a career criminal, he deserved to have his body catered for by the killer, or killers. Leaving him for the morning newspapers and news crews was, well, new. New for Sydney Town.

  His death rated no mention at The Australian, a newspaper that concerned itself with politics, the union movement, business, sport, and increasingly, to my despair, fashion. Australia’s national daily was above such things as common murder. This mighty organ had employed me for some fifteen years, and I had written for most sections of the paper, excluding fashion.

  Wise now, after the event, I might have reflected that, as Danny was a criminal, and the Sydney underworld had a fine tradition of disposing of its victims while sparing the public such grisly sights, something had changed in the town. The criminal fraternity would catch and kill their own, as they were proud to say, and we all felt that included the disposal side of things. Disposal is not such a difficult thing, and a variety of caterers provided the service.

  There was The Chicken Man, who would wrap a body in chicken-wire mesh, through which he wound tiny pellets of dynamite. The body would be taken out to Sydney Harbour and tossed overboard, where the pellets would explode with faint puffing sounds. The sounds of these tiny explosions were lost in the wash of the water, but the flesh was extracted from the bone. The Chicken Man did not feed the bodies to the sharks, but to the fishes. He was respected for his skill in calculation. The wire mesh carried the bones through the fathoms to the harbour floor. The Chicken Man’s occupation came to an end with the extension to Sydney’s International Airport. By the time the concrete pours stopped, the new runways had been laid upon the bones of those who fell from favour in the criminal fraternity. Today, as your 747 touches down at Sydney Airport, it is landing upon, or above, the remains of those who had done that which they should not have done, or had not done that which they should have done. Rumour has it that The Chicken Man himself is encased in the runway’s concrete, a mass grave for men who thought they could outsmart the crime bosses.

  At The Australian, we managed to ignore the next public murder, even though it occurred in a better part of the city. A third slaying followed, a few days after, and then a fourth. Les Hollings, our editor-in-chief, meandered towards my desk on the day of the appearance of a fifth stiff in our fair streets.

  Les was not a clever man, but he was wise. He was thin of frame, a Yorkshireman by birth who had escaped the north of England for a job with a newspaper in Wales, and had ended his career in New South Wales. His time was almost up. The time of the wise was gone, and the clever were taking charge. He wore a long grey cardigan that lesser men mocked. He spoke slowly, at the speed of his thoughts. He was now a very powerful man in Sydney, and a man of influence across the nation. His shoulders had stooped under the weight of his importance.

  Les suggested there ‘might be something going on with all these murders’, and perhaps I should take a look. He seemed to credit me with some sort of understanding of the criminal mind. Apart from being charged with inciting a riot in an anti-war, anti-apartheid, and Aboriginal rights ‘Day of Rage’, twenty years before, I had no record. Les suggested that my familiarity with the trade union movement gave me some special insight into criminality.

  ‘You will be talking to the same people,’ he said.

  He didn’t really mean that the leadership of the Australian trade union movement was responsible for the carnage, but he suspected, with some reason, that certain members or certain unions might be worth, as my favourite spy inside organised Labor would say, ‘a chin wag’.

  The murders, I soon l
earnt, were only faintly related to the trade union movement. As I began scratching around for an angle, another body fell, literally, by the wayside. Having determined that the local crime bosses were equally unhappy with the carnage, my suspicions were directed, naturally enough, to the police. In those days, it was generally assumed by the crime writers that the Vice Squad ran vice, and that the Drug Squad did likewise with drugs, so there was reason to speculate that the Homicide Squad was responsible for homicide. But the cops appeared as mystified as the robbers. Organised crime was becoming very disorganised.

  Unhappily, Les had such confidence in my investigative powers that he had allowed the advertising department at News Ltd to promote my coming exposé on radio and television. This came to me as a shock. I had no idea that they were promo-ing my article, and was surprised to hear someone on the radio informing the nation that I would expose all in the following edition of The Weekend Australian. I looked at my paper and checked the day. Wednesday. The weekend paper went to bed Thursday night, and I had only the faintest idea of what was happening. I remain, to this day, as do the judicial authorities, ignorant of what exactly caused these events.

  But I had found a crack. I had visited some unsavoury pubs for a spot of fishing, and discovered that a man who had tried to pull a gun on me years before in Melbourne had arrived in Sydney. Rumour had it that he was pulling and shooting guns as part of a war in the underworld, and seasoned gangsters were becoming less seasoned by the day. The story was a bit thin, but I drew the bow wide, and produced for the weekend paper a piece plausible enough to cause the Murder Task Force to raid the newspaper in search of my files.

  The cops arrived early on the day following my ‘exposé’. I was sound asleep, it being my Sunday off. My colleague Lynch, who most called Lunch, was acting chief of staff. He woke me with a telephone call explaining that ‘the cops are all over the place’. Demanding files.

  I assured Lynch that I was not in possession of a single file (I did have notes), and suggested that he tell the cops to leave the building before our lawyers were called into play. They had no warrant, and this was the headquarters of News Ltd, the father company of News Corp, owned by the most powerful man on earth, and in all of human history, Rupert Murdoch. Having heard Lynch tell the cops they should ‘fuck off and find some criminals’, I returned the phone to its bed, and slept.