After we moved on from the dinner party, Morrison and I wandered down Melbourne St in our full table-service regalia, heading into the city. Garnering courtesy nods to our appearance from most passers-by. The place we were heading to was a daily exercise in laundering the cesspool of humanity, often sending it out dirtier than it came in. In our tie & tails we’d stick out like dog’s balls. We arrived and checked in via the photo ID bouncer. Morrison opted to have a rolly outside before he went in. Among some of the loitering thugs outside began some high-octane machismo-fuelled chatter around his attire that sounded like a flock of flamingos being put through a woodchipper. Real danger. But Morrison calmly and suavely managed to take the maddened birds into his salesman’s stride, tucked them under his wing and boiled the incident down to a simmering banter. I headed straight in. The place was heaving with the lovely grime of the world. Every possible grade and classification of degenerate was on show and in high-functioning form. Thieves, scumbags, politicians, drug dealers, bums, police officers, real estate agents, oil and media magnates, journalists, murderers, Jewish businessmen, stockbrokers, charlatans, cads and bounders, mountebanks, Christian businessmen, telemarketers, roadies, bikies, sporting heroes, perverts, public masturbators, public fornicators, ex-Nazi party members, current Nazi party members, pyramid sellers, wife-beaters, husband-beaters, marriage counsellors, tow-truck drivers, lawyers… and amid all this, she appeared from out of nowhere, shot through the crowd like a darting hummingbird on fire with an iconoclastic zest, an emaciating perturb of the world and everything around her, she was like a billion radioactive bullets firing for eternity, piercing the cruddy scum with every stride she took, like courting eyes meeting across a crowded and bored-to-death office elevator followed by a wickedly cute and seductive smile… That’s how I met Molly. Morrison grabbed me by the arm. ‘C’mon, let’s go upstairs for a pipe out on the deck.’ This joint had a top floor with a balcony that ran its circumference and doubled as the designated smoker’s area. It was also a respite from the black depths of the putrid ocean of the first floor, a place where you could surface for some semblance of natural light and a few breaths of fresh second-hand smoke. Sometimes it was a godsend, other times not. For I knew the night would never conclude out there on that balcony; you had to revisit the slaughterhouse no matter what. And it can be hard to lung that horrible, viscid first-floor spit-bucket stuff again after getting a dose of antiseptic air, albeit a communally cancerous gulp. So sometimes it was better to keep the immunity at full throttle, stay on the first floor and swim that muck till either eaten alive or spat out onto the sidewalk… In any case, after I’d noticed her, I was going nowhere.