Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Before he became hopelessly addicted to cocaine, spent two stretches in prison for possession, and almost died from an overdose so severe that his muscle tissue leaked into his kidneys, Vassily*, the only son of an immigrant family, led a more or less normal life in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. His parents, who were Jewish, had come here from eastern Europe in the early 1970s with just $750, when Vassily was one.
They rented an apartment in Bondi, in a three-storey, red-brick block a kilometre from the beach. On the floor below them were Vassily’s grandparents; his great-grandparents lived nearby. “Everyone in the building came from the same background,” says Vassily, who I met recently in a rehab clinic in Sydney’s western suburbs.
“Everyone knew each other. All the kids used to play together in the street.“ Shortly after arriving, Vassily’s father completed a mechanics apprenticeship.
With help from his own father, he bought a mechanics shop in Bondi. “Dad was really hard-working,” says Vassily. “He’d come home covered in grease and test cars on the weekends.
” Within a few years, he’d expanded the business, eventually owning almost every mechanic shop in the area. “We moved to a big house, and bought a boat and a farm.” He taught Vassily about hard work and dedication; when the boy showed promise as a junior tennis player, his father pushed him to improve, getting him to train five .
