The Three Johns
I was 26 when I left my work as a country parson to take up the prestigious position as the Minister Cheltenham Church of Christ Victoria. This Church had the reputation of being a very large and alive Church. But that was a mirage. The reality was quite different as this young country parson was soon to discover. The life of a suburban Minister has some real surprises.
About 2am one morning not long after we settled into the new manse, the telephone rang. We were getting known in the area and people were now starting to ring through at all hours of the night asking about missing children or seeking some help in settling a domestic fight. I answered the phone as I have always done with an extra cheery “Good morning, this is Gordon Moyes. May I help you” as if I had been sitting up all night just waiting for that phone to ring.
From the other end of the phone came a very soft voice against a background of traffic noise which indicated someone was ringing from a public telephone. The voice just said “Gidday. It’s John. Would you look after me motor bike?”
It was an unusual request at that hour of the morning so obviously I replied “John. Yes. If I can help you by looking after your motor bike I shall, but where are you and why do you want me to look after your motor bike?”
There was a long pause, then John said “I want you to look after me motor bike because I know a Church of Christ minister will keep his word and I don’t want the Pigs to get it. When they find me in the morning I don’t want them to find my motor bike because the Pigs will only keep the bike and I know a Church of Christ minister will always do what he promises.”
John’s little comment had raised half a dozen questions in my mind and so I continued “What do you mean John when you say that they will find you in the morning?”
John replied “Well I’m not going to be alive am I. I’ve overdosed. I’ve had three injections of pretty pure crud and I’ve also swallowed a double lot, so I am not going to be here am I? And I don’t want the Pigs to get my bike when they find me.”
I realised that this was a serious suicide call and that I must keep John talking until I ascertained where he was and how I could get to help him. I asked, perhaps a little naively, “Where are you ringing from John” and his reply quickly cut off that source of information. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want you trying to find me. I’ve made up my mind and nothing’s going to change it. But I do want you to look after my motor bike.” I decided the only way to get through to John was to talk to him about what he obviously loved most of all, his motor bike.
“John, what kind of a bike is it? I like motor bikes too. In fact until I had my own children I rode motor bikes regularly. What is yours?” John replied with renewed interest “It’s a Honda 1100 CC Waterbottle. What was yours?” “I had a BSA500. That was a powerful old thing, but what I wanted most of all was an Aerial Square Four 1600 CC. If you’ve got an 1100 CC Waterbottle you can imagine what a Square Four was like.”John let out a low whistle, “You’ve worked with powerful bikes” he said “so you’ll understand my Honda 1100. She’s a beauty, but I don’t want the Pigs to get her.”
“John, I promise you that I’ll look after your motor bike properly. But tell me, why did you ring me? Have you been reading about me in the local papers and about the work I’ve been doing with some young people in trouble with the Law?”
I’d received a lot of good publicity lately in the local papers and I naturally thought that John was responding to this publicity. But there is nothing like a good cold draft of reality at 2am in the morning to get rid of inflated ideas of your own importance. John replied “No. I’ve been helped by Keith Farmer, a Church of Christ Minister at Epping up in Sydney and I thought another Church of Christ Minister would be just as good as him and I looked down the list in the telephone book and your Church was the nearest to where I am. I haven’t heard a thing about you, but I am glad you like motor bikes.”
John’s response was just the thing an inflated ego needed. But what was alarming me was that while John was telling me this his speech was getting slower and he was slurring some words. It wasn’t the sound of a drunk but it was the sound of someone who had overdosed.
“John, let me ask you, are you taking pretty pure heroin?” John replied “This is pretty pure crud and I took it heavy because I don’t intend to be here in the morning. But don’t you try to find me. Just look after my bike.”
I decided I had to keep our contact going by focusing on his bike.
“John, I can think of nothing finer than to look after your bike for you and I promise you it will receive the best treatment that any bike has ever received. The only problem I have is that I really need your papers. If the police find out when I go to register it in my name that it belongs to you, they will be onto me like a ton of bricks. They may even charge me with murdering you, in order to get the bike. I’ve got to have your papers John. Have you got your ownership papers with you? Or your licence, or will you sign a bit of paper that you give me the bike. Otherwise I won’t be able to look after it for you.” There was a long pause and I could hear the traffic going by.
John came back onto the line. “I can give you the papers and I’ll sign something saying I give you the bike but I don’t want to see you.” By now his voice was becoming much more slurred and I realised that this was a race against time. Taking a gamble on the fact that he said he’d only picked me out of the phone book because I was a Church of Christ Minister like Keith Farmer in Sydney and because I was near to where he was I said to him “John, do you know the car park outside Southland, the shopping centre?” John replied that he did. “Well can you get there? I’ll tell you what I’ll do. There is a huge light pole in the centre of the car park which shines lights in all directions. I’ll walk over there and stand under that light and you can watch me from the shadows. You’ll see that I’ve got no one with me and that I’m really on my own. Then if you like you can flash your bike lights or come over to me and give me the papers. It’s the only way I’ll be able to look after your bike for you.”
There was another long pause. John started to speak but his words had now become very slurred. “’Salright. Come on over to South…South…South…Southland. I’ll watch you from the shad…shad…shad…shadow and I’ll give you the papers for my bike.”
My wife had been listening to this conversation for sometime while I was speaking to him from my bed and expressed worry about going alone out into the heart of a vacant car park to meet with a drug addict who had overdosed. But I knew it was the only way we could make contact with the young man who was getting closer to death with every minute. I pulled a pair of trousers and a jumper over my pyjamas, a trick I have learned through visiting homes in the middle of the night and having frequently sat, freezing, beside a bed with some dying person. Pulling your trousers and jumper over the pyjamas always kept you warm.
I was out the door and across the road and running up the highway towards Southland within a minute. I then very consciously slowly walked through the bushes that surrounded the huge car park at the Southland Shopping Centre and walked through the car park. There was not a vehicle or person in sight but I knew that out in the shadows I was being watched. I walked to the huge light tower in the centre of the car park and stood there slowly walking around the light pole so that no matter where my new found friend might be he could see that I was alone.
Twenty minutes or more went by and I began to wonder if I was too late when, from the dark side lines of the car park, there came the unmistakable low growl of a high powered motor bike and a headlight was switched on and pointed in my direction. A bike came across the car park and pulled up. John turned the motor off and got off pulling off leather gloves and a helmet. He was about twenty years of age, unshaven, bloodshot eyes and with tremors in his hands. He looked in a very bad way. He spoke with an English accent and looked very much the worse for wear. He looked at me and said softly “Gidday, its John”.
I shook hands with him and stood back and admired the bike. It was a race against time but I thought it very important that he saw that I was interested only in the bike. To do anything at this stage could have meant I would have lost contact with him. I rubbed my hand over the petrol tank and walked around looking at it, admiring it.
“You understand about the papers John? If I don’t have your papers the police will think that I have stolen it and when they trace it back they’ll realise it belonged to you and then they might charge me with your death in order to steal your bike. I must have your papers.” John nodded and pulled out of his pocket his registration paper for the motor bike. On the back was a sale or disposal form. John had already filled it in indicating that he had sold the bike to me and that I was the lawful owner. He then signed it and gave it to me. His speech was very slurred by now and he was unsteady on his feet. I knew that if I asked him to go to hospital or anything else he would just disappear into the night. I decided on another plan. “I’ve got a very fine place to keep your bike. On the side of my garage there is an open area which is beautifully constructed. I think someone built it to store wood in at sometime. It’s got a concrete floor and it is very dry. I’ll put some carpet in there and make it really clean and nice and I’ll keep the bike there. It’ll always be under protection and will always be dry. Come with me and I’ll show you where I’ll keep your bike.”
And without waiting for a reply I just put my leg over the saddle and indicated that he should get behind me. He did so, and I started the bike and we drove off together across the Southland car park. I drove up the drive into our place and stopped up near the top by the garage. John was becoming very unsteady on his feet and very glazed of eye. I knew it was essential that I get him to hospital straight away. I asked him to wait while I took out my car so he could see how I kept the rest of the garage. He seemed to be so sick at this stage that he just did whatever I told him. I then steered him carefully around to the passenger’s side of the car and taking his keys and mine opened the passenger’s side door and gently pushed him in. As soon as he got inside the car on the passenger’s seat, I locked the door and shut it fast behind him.
John then realised that I was up to something and he tried to get out by climbing up over the passenger’s seat into the back. He only made it half way. When he was up on the seat leaning over to get into the back seat I started the car off backwards down the drive and the top half of his body just hung over down into the space before the front seat and the back and at that point he passed out.
I hit the bottom of my drive where it met the road rather fast. I was always careful crossing over that gutter but that night I hit it fast and as I did the impetus of hitting that gutter had an impact upon the body of John as he hung over the passenger seat back. I could hear him involuntarily vomit. He vomited once, twice, a third time as I drove the car round and into the highway and off towards Melbourne. I sped all the way hoping for the first time in my life a police car would come up beside me and I could indicate that I needed an escort to get to the Royal Melbourne Hospital Emergency. John just kept vomiting with his hands dangling in the vomit on the floor of the back seat.
I knew exactly where to go because I had often been into the Emergency Unit of the Royal Melbourne Hospital. As I pulled up outside the double doors of the Ambulance bay two orderlies jumped to attention and rushed out with a trolley. “Drug overdose, it’s an emergency” I called to them. They had John out and on the trolley in a flash and ran him inside the Emergency Unit. I looked in the back seat and on the floor was a dreadful concoction of vomit and drugs and beer.
I parked the car away from the Emergency Unit and then went back. They wanted details. I gave him John’s licence and registration papers and they took the details and wrote down my name as next of kin. They already had him on a stomach pump and were giving him whatever drugs were necessary to counter the overdose. He was unconscious and there was no point in my waiting, so I returned home.
I should have cleaned out the vomit that night because when I got home I stumbled into bed and when I woke next morning I had the most stinking car that you could possibly imagine.
I visited John in hospital. At first he was angry that I had taken him to the Unit and then appreciative. I visited him each day for the next three days and then received a call from the Hospital. As next of kin they were notifying me that I should take him home.
I picked John up in the same clothes that he was wearing when I brought him in and headed back to Cheltenham.
What were we going to do with him now? The day before I’d used his keys to let myself into his flat in Elsternwick. It was a typical flat of some travelling drug addict. A mattress on the floor, clothes strewn round, not one possession of any value. Anything of value that he had owned he had obviously pawned or sold in pubs in order to get money for his last big hit of drugs. I knew we couldn’t send him back to that flat. I knew I also couldn’t put him up in our house. We had a three bedroom wooden manse with children – my wife and I in the main bedroom, our children in the second and my mother-in-law who had not been well staying with us in the other bedroom. I had to think of another way.
In the last couple of days I had told John’s story and had spoken about him to two special young men in my congregation. They were both only six years younger than myself, both being twenty and they were two of the finest young men I’d ever met. Both were called John.
John One was studying to be a doctor at Melbourne University and had a first rate brain and took and interest in the whole pharmacology of drugs that I had mentioned to him. He’d done some research and told me that the crud that John had swallowed was cocaine and had studied up its symptoms and effects. John Two was a printer, a big strong young fellow who played with me in our Church football team. He was a good man to have round in any kind of trouble. Loyal and dedicated and a good friend. These two young Johns I had with me when I discussed John Foster’s 2am phone call. They both indicated that they would be willing to help him if he recovered. The day I brought John Foster home to our place I decided that we should form a team to help him, if he was interested in going cold turkey.
I don’t know whether John had tried to kick the drug habit before but if ever he had a good chance it was now. He had been drug free for three days and would have been through some of the worst of the withdrawals. If we could only persuade him to go cold turkey the rest of the time he had a good chance of beating the addiction. I had arranged with both Johns that if he agreed to go cold turkey I would give them a call and they would drop whatever they were doing and come to meet him at my house. I sent out the two calls and within minutes both Johns were in our lounge room with a very sick and feeble looking John. Three Johns.
The amazing thing was that the two Johns from the Cheltenham Church of Christ were born only four days apart and John Foster who had just come into our life was only a week older than the other two. Yet what a difference between them. One young man penniless, a drug addict and suicidal, the other a medical student on his way to becoming a doctor intent on saving life and the other a young business man in the making who had learnt his trade and was developing his skills. Surely between the three of us we could help John Foster.
I’d asked the boys to bring sleeping bags with them and we got some rubber lilos that we used for camping and we set up in a little room off the stage in the old Sunday School hall – a place where the four of us could sleep each night while we helped John go cold turkey through this addiction.
We set up ourselves in the Church kitchen with some food and put some lilos down in one of the rooms off the stage. Two of us would be awake with John at any time and the other two would be on call. John One had been studying up the pharmacology of withdrawal and gave us a very bleak picture of what might happen as his body cried out for drugs. He also kept a very careful record of John’s temperature and pulse and would be ready to see he went to hospital immediately he took any turn for the worse. John Two and myself were to be there simply to support him, to keep walking with him as the pains moved through his body, in every joint as it cried out for more heroin.
What we didn’t count on was the way the body would also react. John only got relief from the pains and withdrawal by walking and by calling out with a loud voice. We walked round and round inside the Sunday School hall, hundreds of circuits. John walked and talked constantly hour after hour. Occasionally he involuntarily vomited or passed diarrhoea and that was the signal for John Two or myself. We were the clean up people. Our task was to clean him up and to clean up the hall and keep it going. All day, one day, the next, and the next and all that night we talked with John, walked with John, fed him the kind of sustenance that John One had decided was necessary for him. Plenty of fluids, plenty of protein, and sweet things. By Saturday John was still going through high sweats and great pains. The school hall would need to be set up for Sunday School so we packed up and shifted down to my parent’s holiday home on Westernport Bay, to a place called Warneet.
Throughout the weekend the two Johns kept him company as he continued through withdrawal while I conducted a wedding and Church services. At the beginning of the next week, John’s body had settled down to normal. He was now free of his addiction to heroin.
John moved into John Two’s house just over the road from ours where we could keep an eye on him and over the next weeks progressed very well. However, he had a noisy personality and at times became very aggressive. It was only then that we found that while he had come off drugs he had substituted Beenleigh Rum. He had been buying bottles of rum secretly and needed the kick that the rum was giving him, only whenever he was intoxicated he became aggressive. Over the next few weeks we worried about John and his motor bike. On one occasion, drunk on rum, he had driven up a footpath and through the front door of a chemist shop. On another occasion he failed to stop when a tram in the centre of the city stopped and he ran right into the back of it. Remarkably his bike survived but John looked rather the worse for wear.
On another occasion he came knocking at my door in the early hours of the morning. He’d been in a drunken fight in a pub and he’d had his assailants kick his face in a most dreadful way. His jaw was smashed at an odd angle, his nose was flattened upon a check, his eyes bulged black and one eyeball looked dangerously as if it was out of its socket.
Once more I took John to the hospital but on this occasion just before we left I made him stand underneath the sign board of our Christian Education Centre and I took his photograph. Never had you seen a more smashed, pulverised face and I took him standing under the word Christian in Christian Education Centre. I wanted him when he was sober to see what he really looked like.
John recovered from all of these events. My elders in the Church were not at all happy that I’d introduced a drug addict into our Youth Group. Some of the women in the Church were very critical that I was exposing my own young children to the impact of a drug addict. To make matters worse my son David took a real liking to John and John in turn took the young fellow on the back of his motor bike to visit Santa Claus and then on one occasion with much trepidation we gave approval for him to take young David to the Zoo. But John acted with incredible care whenever he had young David around him. Our trust in him paid off and John’s life began to show the signs of complete change.
He never became a committed Christian. “I believe in God and I know why you are doing this for me but I don’t want to become a Christian just out of appreciation for what you are doing” he said.
The time came for the two Johns to celebrate their twenty first birthdays. They decided to have a joint twenty first party and because John Foster had no parents in Australia and no other relatives we decided to make it a three way twenty first birthday celebration. It was a greatest night of John Foster’s life. It was at the twenty first that he announced he was going back to England. “I will never forget yous” he said “You saved my life.”
According to the books the story of John Foster should have finished there but that’s not real life. A couple of months later the phone rang at 2am in the morning and a quiet voice said from across the other side of the world “Gidday. It’s John. I’m just ringing to let you know I’m OK.” He was simply telling me that he had settled in to England and was living in London. Another two months went by and again at 2am the phone rang and I heard the by now familiar “Gidday. It’s John. Just ringing to let you know I’m OK.” Then John told me the most exciting news. He’d been accepted into the London Polytechnic to study as a social worker.
Over the next three years, whenever he happened to be alone in some faculty member’s office or somewhere there was a phone he could use without having to pay for it, I would received this 2am call and the words “Gidday. It’s John. Just ringing to let you know I’m OK.” He kept in contact with me throughout his course and throughout his graduation and then I had a call from Manchester. The same words “Gidday. It’s John. Just ringing to let you know I’m OK.” He’d been employed by the Manchester City Council and was now working as a social worker between blacks and whites and those young people with drug problems in inner city Manchester.
As the years have gone by calls have become fewer. It is now two years since he last called me and my address which I had for him no longer reaches him. I don’t know where he is. Maybe he has taken another job but all I know is that a sober and a healthy young man now middle aged is helping other people in the same way as the two Johns at Cheltenham had helped him. But it could be that any night from now the phone will ring in the early morning hours and a voice will say “Gidday. It’s John. Just ringing to let you know I’m OK” and I will be immediately back there in Cheltenham on the night I went to the Southland car park to meet a person who wanted me to care for his motor bike.
That night in my study I spent some time in my study writing up my journal and looking out of the window at the never ending stream of cars stopping at the traffic lights at the corner of Nepean Highway and Chesterville Road, that wide intersection that was dominated by the lovely white Church with the high white tower noting down the events of another day as a suburban minister.
GORDON MOYES