Every few months, I decide to venture into the wider world, abandon my children, and take my wife on a mini-break. This time I chose a surf trip - and I'm doing it the cheapest way possible.

This time it was a 360$ deal for one week at Ocean Landings Resort at Cocoa Beach, right down the road from Cape Canaveral.

The above two pictures and these reviews give you the idea.

These review people don’t know that Life is what you make it, especially if you are Substacks Premier Gonzo Reporter.

It’s right on the beach, and one of my greatest joys in life is to be with my people, who are the poor, who are making the best of things, and trying to live the American dream while being constantly reminded that it’s a mostly out-of-reach mirage, and just going ahead and trying to live it anyway.

I, of course, did not show any of the reviews to my wife, but instead just talked it up, like the great salesman I am. I went over all the features and the highlights of the area, reading the best reviews of fine restaurants and beaches out to her as we drove across the state.

Like always, she believed that it would be nice. Though… on seeing and smelling the room, she did say “ Oh… Wow…” but not the WOW like WOW this is amazing … like the “Wow … sorry to hear your husband has been secretly doing meth with his secretary and banging her at the lumber yard”, wow.

She just got back from the pool at 10 AM as I write this…

The conversation went like this.

HER: ”The pool is full of professional pool people.”

Me: “What does that mean?

HER: “Well, like they are super tanned, dark brown, and drinking at 10 am in the 95-degree heat, and they just stand in the pool and don’t swim. The Bar at the pool is already open, and the girl in ripped jean shorts with her ass hanging out is already running around getting orders.”

ME: Let me guess: “ They are overweight and have gold chains and shitty tattoos and maybe even frosted spiky hair, or no hair.”

HER: “How did you know?”

ME: “I think this is where the Jersey type people come, the ones that were once cool like 20 years ago”

—

One of the first things I have to do to prepare for our week-long stay is get supplies. And because I like to eat healthy and I’m a feral hippy to my bones, I always find the Organic Food Co-Op / Health store place.

Now this is where I have always had a bit of a disconnect.

Growing up as a feral commune living hippie in New Zealand in the mid-90s, we were anti-capitalist. We traded with each other and grew most of our food and our own drugs, be it mescaline or weed, or magic mushrooms.

We made money by selling things to the WEALTHY. Organic veges at high prices, freshly squeezed orange juice at 4 dollars a cup, comb honey for 30$ a block….

It was never lost on me that while the feral hippie Organic life was supposed to be the cure for the evils of Capitalism, it’s the most parasitic on it.

And so it still is, here at Cocoa Beach. I went into the Organic store… and was hit by the same smell that all of these stores have around the world. A mix of essential oils, incense, slight BO, shame, and greed.

I always announce myself to the girls at the checkouts on the way in.

You know the ones. LARPing as real hippies… with the badly done dreads, the glazed looks, and the hemp shirts.

“YO YO YO!! - I LOVE THIS SMELL” I say.

They always just smile nervously.

I got my supplies of an amazing candle to aromaise out the damp mold smell of our resort room. This one has Crystals in it !

This is it here.

Light this healing, non-toxic Wellness Candle® to create a soothing environment that brings clarity and inner peace. The beautiful combination of lavender & lemongrass essential oils infused with amethyst crystals will ease your senses with a calming and peaceful energy.

I don’t need a clean room free of roaches, damp, and mold. I just need this 15$ candle to blast that shit out. It burns next to me as I write this… its healing fumes penetrating my brain.

I got my coconut water and my organic coffee, and then I saw a brightly colored setup in the corner.

It was a drug booth. What the hell? I have been busy the last few years and have never seen one of these.
Shit called Kratom, Delta 9. CBD, Gummy Mushroom, Hemp Joints…

One of the Fake hippy chicks came over, and I got talking to her…

She and I went back and forth on what it all was. It was like Drugs Lite.

She asked if I had tried any of this stuff. I said, “No, I just did the real drugs back in the 90s. Why would people not do real drugs and spend money on this? What’s the point of feeling “Slightly out of it from a combination of fake magic mushrooms and CBD weed, when the whole point of drugs is to totally block out the grim meat-hook realities of earthly existence and form a protective shield around you from the evil, while you explore the inner realms of the illusion by totally altering your consciousness? What are people doing? Play acting? God, everything is hijacked by commercialism now and fake. Look at these labels. DAD GRASS.!! JUST FUCK RIGHT OFF WITH THAT SHIT. ”

Look at this shit :

Dad Grass is reviving the mellow sensibility of the casual smoke. Their 100% Organic hemp flower and pre-rolled joints serve up a clean buzz without the fuss. ( THE FUSS WHAT THE FUCK IS THE FUSS??? )

Made with only the finest 100% USDA Organic hemp flower, responsibly grown right here in the USA. ( Like not by an irresponsible feral paranoid kiwi hippie sleeping in the middle of his crop with a shotgun… ie me in 1998.)

Every Twoobie™ box and doob tube has a little green label that helps you learn more about the 100% Organic hemp used for these joints. A quick glance will give you the batch number as well as the percentage of CBD and THC (always below 0.3%!). Dad Grass goes the extra mile to make sure what you smoke is 100% pure and that nothing has accidentally creeped into their crop. Before twisting it up, they send their freshly trimmed flower to the same independent third-party labs that test the marijuana you find in dispensaries. Not only do they make sure there are no pesticides, mold, fungus, bacteria, heavy metals or other toxins, they also determine the precise concentrations of THC and CBD as well as the terpene profile.

OK… having gone completely insane and almost dying from smoking moldy weed in 95, I can see some sense in the above… You want to do drugs and fuck your life up… but you also want to stay alive so you can do more drugs.

Anyway …

The gal looked at me as I ranted…she was horrified… she was just a 25-year-old beach girl, offering me expensive fake drugs in a hippie store.

I said “I’m sorry… Im like this because Im 50 and did so much drugs back in the 90s and lived so long on communes that I get excited sometimes…. but Its much healtier to just go with the aromatheray candle and the coconut water than mess around with any substances.. because if you DO, you will wind up like those 50 year old chicks who come in here who are look like they about to start screaming at any secord…and they buy one avocado and a tiny chocolate bar and wear all hemp clothes and make absoulety no sense to you…

Her eyes widened and she nodded in understanding…

She was then saved from further education by her boss.

Probably 60, he was living the dream. He was an old surfer who ran this store. He had a can of some new IPA from California and was pounding it in the store at work. It was 8%. He said, “ Hey, this is a new beer I bought for the store, do you want some….?

And so it was he saved the girl from my Gen X spaz ranting, and he and I drank this IPA together, and it was good. We got to talking about communes and businesses and the modern world, and he took me over to the bargain bin by the door.
I said, “How much off is this stuff”
He said, “For you it’s all free, man. It’s all expired. But we both know it’s all still good”

Hell yes, brother. I went to work checking out what was there and grabbing all the best free expired supplements up! Check out what I got!

Apple cider vinegar gummies. 16$. I just eat these like candy.

30X Libido-enhancing cream. 45$. I have been rubbing that all over me and my wife’s arms every few hours, at 10x the recommended dose.

Sustained release Ultra 1 Daily Vitamins. 38$. These are huge horse pills that smell so strong they stink up any room you open the bottle in.

Cholesterol Metabolism factors 45$. This is to stop me getting the Diabetus…

Cardiovascular Health and Gut Support 30$ For my black guts.

—

I rolled out of there very happy. Buzzed from this strong beer and feeling the joy of the hippie connection and the chance to help educate a young girl on the dangers of drug experimentation.

That’s Chemical dependency counsellor 101: Never fail to use your present erratic behaviour as a lesson on the dangers of a misspent youth.

I celebrated in the car by washing down a ton of expired supplements with coconut water.

And all is well at Cocoa Beach.

Thanks for reading. If more mental shit goes down, there will be more news reports.

My book is packed with stories about my life that I hint about in the above!

If you want to send me money because you want to support my writing here :)

buymeacoffee.com/obsidianblackbird

If you like the story and want to support me, subscribe, restack this story and share and buy my book! 500 pages of Gen X storytime goodness.

BUY THE BOOK !!

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View of Wellington and night… what I saw as we fled the house and I started my new life, as a 17 year old homeless legend.

Within a week of hanging with my boy Terry, I was too twisted and baked to do any school work and after a period of class spent frozen and staring...reeking of the devil’s lettuce, I burped and weed smoke came out of my mouth.

The teacher asked me “Do you really want to be here?”

So wise, was that teacher. The answer was no then and is still no, as I write this, now 30 years later.

I decided to leave and enter the workforce! Challenge! Freedom! Money.

The only thing holding me back now was the attachment of financial strings.

Due to well meaning parents paying to support me and keep me fed and housed, I could not be fully free to chart my own destiny. My parents were paying my way, further miring me in lame middle-class pamperedness.

I just couldn’t handle the fact that these other kids I was hanging with, (Even Terry) could just go to the parents fridge and get food. Or come home and sleep in their bedroom after going out partying and pretending to be free and self directed.

It’s a fucking scam. Unless you’re totally punk and not dependent on mum and dad, you are just a trenchcoat wearing doofus from middle class suburbia.

Sticking feathers up your arse does not make you a chicken. Nothing will change that. I had to go it alone and cut them strings. I was going to get a job and go my own way!

The paper was the only medium of jobs back then, for a 17 year old who knew no one.

“SUPER ENTHUSIASTIC PEOPLE WANTED.”

Your heart should be sinking right now.

That’s right up there with “Must be able to handle pressure” and “We are like a Family” In a job posting. It means danger and abuse. People know that now, 30 years on. I of course thought “That’s me!”

Turning up to an office that was just a partitioned-off part of an open top floor in a cheap and rundown, downtown building. I missed all the warning signs and signed on right away.

All I could gather from the harried and cheap-suited, 20-something running the place, was that it was some kind of sales outfit. They were sending me to a town on the other side of the country by train tomorrow, and that I was the greatest employee they had ever hired and that I would do great, and All I needed was a sleeping bag and a couple of nice shirts.

Zero red flags.

The anti-drug people were right, drug use can cause “Risk-taking behavior”.

I was on that train early the next morning once again full of hopes and dreams. I was off the drugs and cutting free from twisted Terry the Munter whose hijinks had got a little less, “Blaze weed and go to parties and mosh and steal shit to eat”, and more of the “cutting self while listening to Black Sabbath in your bedroom” variety.

Lame.

I was thinking about money and girls and freedom!

An eight-hour trip thinking about my amazing bright future ended with meeting my handler once I got off the train. A red-headed, leprechaun-looking Australian surfer guy in a green hoodie. Super over-the-top enthusiastic. “Greenie” welcomed me to the team.

We drove in the battered white van to the “Team House”.

On arrival I see three miserable people sitting on the floor of a lounge in a cheap freezing rental. Wellington in winter. Wet, miserable…There is no furniture. Hmm, that’s a bit odd.

Person one: Tall skinny guy in his 20s with long hair and black jeans. A heavy metal guy.

Person two: A short stout dwarf Afrikaner South African guy of about 30.

Person three: A really, really sad-looking overweight gal in her 20s with curly black hair.

And now Me! “Hi, I’m Super Enthusiastic Person wanted!”

Greenie showed me the room I was sharing with the Afrikaner guy and heavy metal guy. My section of carpet to lay my sleeping bag.

I stayed up late, talking to the Dwarf.

He had been kicked out of home when young due to drugs, and his father being super strict, and so he had wandered the world. Now he was here and he was trying to make a go of this. He had been here two weeks. He was so deranged he actually thought it was a real job.

In the morning we all assembled in the kitchen for breakfast which was oatmeal made in one pot and poured into four coffee mugs with no spoons.

“Where’s Jess”

Greenie: “Oh she had to go.”

Ok… so we got in the van and Greenie dropped the guys off and then worked with me in a park teaching me the job and the script.

Basically, it was a door-to-door sales company, selling $2500 children’s learning programs. I would knock on the doors in the worst neighborhoods of this town, and give my pitch and try to set up appointments for Greenie to close them for a big package for their kid.

If he closed a deal I would get 250$.

It was easy and he even had a little rhyme that I should say if I started feeling like lying down flat on the sidewalk and not getting up again.

The rhyme went: “I’ve got the Juice, got the Fire, Got the Burning Desire!”

I was all set.

After a few hours of pitching to beer and baby holding, ciggie in the mouth single mums, old people with no kids telling me so, and people asking me “Why the fuck would you bang on my door and ask if I have any kids?”, I had lost all hope and started to have out of body experiences brought on by a combo of terror and shame.

Looking at myself detachedly from above… 17, stonewashed jeans, short sleeve white dress shirt, sweaty, wretched, jonesing for a high. Withdrawing from booze and weed in a sour sweat.

The Grim meathook realities of life jabbing into me.

I was trying to be good! What the fuck! If you were good, wasn’t the universe supposed to reward you? Nope… it seemed to me that it just lined you up for a harder kick in the nuts, for being so stupid and trusting. And this time you aren’t numbed out from booze and drugs… so its gonna hurt.

Alone, broke, trapped.

I had told my parents to fully cut me off and had proudly told everyone I knew I was going it alone and I got an amazing job. On my way to success I was!I was off the Devils Lettuce, got a haircut, and I was going to really make something of myself.

Make ‘em all proud…

I had the sad and scary realization that no one actually gave enough of a shit about me to talk to me about my life and try to explain what “Super enthusiastic people wanted” meant.

After watching myself bound up to about 10 doors, give my spiel, and be shut down I started to get a bit worried. I was doing the rhyme, and it didn’t seem to be working! … what the hell Greenie!

I started having panic attacks as I approached the doors now and would just veer off and walk down the street… I then fully bugged out to a nearby park. Within a few minutes, Greenie rolled up in the van. Probably was spying on me. You know it’s a good job when you have to spy on your guys in case they try to make a break for it.
Super enthusiastic.

I explained that I couldn’t do this anymore and he said I could, and tried to help me realize this by kicking a soccer ball back and forward with me while rambling on about harnessing the juice and the fire or something...I was too numb to really listen.

Dinner was a bucket of tepid KFC shared between us four in the cold house with no furniture. Had a lukewarm shower with no soap and used a T-shirt for a towel. Greenie had rolled out by himself…that night, likely to get himself a yummy dinner and a few beers with his own money.

I started chatting to the other lost boys, sitting dejectedly on the carpet of the bare living room. I can only remember one thing about that conversation. And it went like this...

Tall long hair Heavy metal guy: “I would literally rather live on the streets than do this job”

ME: “Same”

Him: “I’m going to bail tonight, it’s easy to live on the streets. You just hang out at the library, eat leftovers from the food court, sneak into movies and there are lots of good places to hide around the city and sleep.”

Me “Man let’s go!”

We went to our room and packed, suddenly we heard Greenie pulling up the drive, so we hightailed it out the window. My last look at the place was the Afrikaner dwarf seriously saluting us from the window EXACTLY like he was some kind of left-behind wounded soldier, ready to hold the enemy back so we could escape.

And so we fled into the night.

My book is packed with stories like the above!

If you want to send me money because you want to support my writing here :)

buymeacoffee.com/obsidianblackbird

If you like the story and want to support me, subscribe, restack this story and share and buy my book! 500 pages of Gen X storytime goodness.

BUY THE BOOK !!

Kindle

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FVVFHZTS?tag=bk00010a-20&th=1&psc=eniuslink=true

Hardcopy

https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=qpgeD35Sbj5Uk5XRfEycCkaS1djAkDiZDZQX01Q4hN4

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New Zealand is a somewhat quiet country. We don’t have screaming birds like Australia, and our people—like the birds—don’t generally scream at each other.

It is not culturally acceptable to yell or be pushy or demand good service or get in anyone’s face or make a big deal of yourself.

And on that, I have a story to tell you.

I was 14 years old living in a small, sedate town in rural New Zealand, when onto this dignified stage walked a relative who had moved to the USA in his youth.

He was 6’4”, weighed about 250 pounds, and had a huge red beard with a similar mop of hair.

He ran a fleet of crab boats out of Seattle and had a big, booming voice, a deafening laugh, and fists like Christmas hams.

He was alive in a way I had only seen in American movies!

He told loud crazy stories and spouted his own huge, definite opinions.

I would always lurk near, listening… as I was obsessed with the Promised Land (Merica), and it was my life’s goal to live in America and have money and food.

If I couldn’t be like the kids on Beverly Hills 90210, then maybe I could at least be like Al Bundy on “Married with Children”.

No one in the family could tolerate him. They would be super nice to his face but behind his back, they would sarcastically mock him and his forceful, righteous, American ways.

His larger-than-life presence and thundering voice still echo in my mind to this day.

One moment I shared with him has stuck with me forever.

That moment changed me and put me on a path out of New Zealand’s dark and rainy conservative clutches and into the healing, freedom-filled embrace of the Promised Land (Merica).

He, myself, and two other family members had gone into the hardware store to get some nails and wire to fix a fence on the farm.

We went up to the counter to get some help.

The clerk was reading the newspaper.

Big Red said, “Hey buddy, I’m looking for these particular nails (he described them) and this particular wire (described it).”

I should explain that customer service in New Zealand is almost nonexistent, especially in the service industry where there is no tipping. You just get what you get and like it. Or you just have to be sad.

The clerk, without even really looking up, limply gestured toward the aisles of hardware products and said, “I’m not sure if we have that, but you can look down there.” And then he went back to reading his newspaper.

Big Red looked shocked, and I saw a terrifying transformation come over him.

He had just TOTALLY FUCKING HAD IT.

He was used to the good “Yes Sir” service he’d received in the USA.
Professional service and personal capability were important things to him, and he had ranted about this many times; never failing to point out to us how shit New Zealand was.

He liked to point out that McDonald’s makes 100 times more than New Zealand, and it was all because we were poor, lazy, pathetic, and sad.

I agreed. Hoping he would one day hire me.

He ran a crab boat crew, and the guys on those boats had to be very capable and go into action right away. If you weren’t professional, skilled, and swift, you could die.

Big Red had just had it with the can’t-do, no-assistance attitude of the people in the New Zealand service industry. So he slammed his ham-sized fist down in full force on the countertop and yelled in his earth-shattering yelling-above-the-wind-and-waves voice, “I WANT CAN DO!!”

I swear everything on that countertop jumped a foot in the air, the clerk’s eyes bugged out of his head, and his mouth gaped open like a hooked bass.

Big Red yelled again, “I WANT FUCKING CAAAAAN DO!!! CLOWN!!!! I WANT WIRE! I WANT NAILS!!!!”

The clerk jumped up and zoomed down the aisles like he was on wheels.
And guess what? We got our wire and nails in short order.

I watched the whole episode in awe.

The other two family members literally ran and hid in their cars after the first CAN DO!

They were so embarrassed.

Not me though! I marched along with him and carried the stuff out like a boss.

Yeah! I want CAN DO too! Get those fuckin’ nails for us, dipshit! Us real men have a fence to build!

Afterward, Big Red and I fixed the fence and had a fantastic day together, where I had him tell me story after story of the Promised Land and how much better it was than New Zealand.

I think that incident kept me grinning for an entire week.

For years after that, I would yell, “I WANT CAN DO!” and slam my fist onto things whenever someone told me something could not be done. As I wasn’t massive and had no huge, scary, red beard, my actions were met with varying levels of success.

We can always do with more CAN DO.

I’m writing this at 12:24 a.m.… FFS…

I do know that the idea of driving forward and getting things done propelled me to live a rad and adventurous life. I refused to be a victim that could not get shit done.

This came in very handy as detailed in my other stories about roofing and logging and demolition.

Over the next 20 years I pushed myself to become so CAN DO! that I would out-CAN-DO the toughest maniacs on the worksites. This was likely very unhealthy and damaging to my body and mind. But it makes for good stories…

People don’t say “harden up!” to complainers enough anymore… but I used to do that.

Let’s bring it back :)

22 and lugging 3 tons of slate a day up ladders onto roofs in the hot Aussie Sun - being CAN DO!

—

My book is packed with stories like the above!

If you want to send me money because you want to support my writing here :)

buymeacoffee.com/obsidianblackbird

If you like the story and want to support me, subscribe, restack this story and share and buy my book! 500 pages of Gen X storytime goodness.

BUY THE BOOK !!

Kindle

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FVVFHZTS?tag=bk00010a-20&th=1&psc=eniuslink=true

Hardcopy

https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=qpgeD35Sbj5Uk5XRfEycCkaS1djAkDiZDZQX01Q4hN4

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Or... “How to turn a dream of becoming a cool grunge badass, into living on the streets of a rainy city, alone and numb, in three easy steps.”

So there I was, a young man.

I had left home and moved to the big city of Auckland, from my rural New Zealand hometown to find fame and fortune.

I had just turned 17 and was full of hopes and dreams.

I had enrolled in a well-known drama school that was bonkers liberal in its attitude toward students.

I had heard stories of kids blazing weed on the field, an actual cigarette smoking area for kids who smoked, loose moraled girls, wild parties, and all sorts of other fun-sounding mischiefs.

Of course, most of the above was all going on at my rural high school, but I had grown up with all the kids at that school and they knew all my tricks.

At this new school, I would be able to reinvent myself as some kind of “Christian Slaterish” grunge badass.

My friend was going to help reinvent me and become part of the cool kids clique at this school. Something he had managed to already do.

I was going to be part of a clique called the “Munch Bunch”.

This was done on day one by completely changing my clothes from the ragged grunge uniform I usually wore, to a kind of preppy CK 1-covered munch bunch uniform of baggy jeans and a nice polo shirt with the top button done up and gel styled hair.

The orders from my friend were simple. “Don’t act weird, no crazy acrobatic shit, no stories, no jokes, don’t sing any songs… just be cool.”

So I rolled up to the school with him and was cool. Nodding to the cool kids. Standing back observing.

This lasted until about lunchtime.

My friend wasn’t around… so I somehow said something funny…This got laughter and looks…and from there evolved into stories, jokes, and songs...

By the time my friend got back and saw me walking down the steps on my hands, to the laughter of the Munch Bunch… it was over. The court jester was in charge now….

He came over and informed me that I should be hanging out under that tree over there with the freaks. Looking over I saw a bunch of kids looking over at me…

An Asian goth chick in all black and also wearing a cloak, a tall weird-looking dude with a ginger afro, two Rasta-dressed guys playing hacky sack, and some kid in a suit with a briefcase.
They waved to me. The ginger Afro guy literally chanting “One of us, One of us.”

I went over.

The next day I was back in my ragged orange cardigan with “I’m Grunge” painted on the back, plaid shirt, cut of army pants, and red beret and I was ranting with my people, the freaks.

My purpose in going to this school was to fulfill some kind of dream of being a famous actor and performer through the medium of hard work, showing up, and learning the craft.

Somehow… hanging with these freaks triggered something in me…

Even these freaks were conforming to what society felt they should be like as freaks. There were layers in this thing called cliques or groups… it was all a made-up act… I guess some people never realize this. For me, it was clear now…. my country school never had this… we were just a demented mass.

This was new…an ideological class system of sorts.

I had figured it out…

I’m not saying that I’m special or smart. It’s obvious how special and smart I am by the series of incredibly bad choices I made. It is what it is.

By hanging with the beatnik freaks, and listening to their opinions on what is good and bad, right and wrong, I rapidly came to the conclusion that these partitioned off cliques were just another masturbatory exercise in human social conformity.

Maybe it was just layers of conformity to cliques all the way up to heaven and all the way down to hell?

If I was to really grow and know myself I would have to force it.

This is harder than it seems when you are so programmed to make correct choices.
It was going to take a bit of headbutting life and a certain amount of focused self-destruction.

My guides were Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, The Doors, and every bit of beat literature stretching back to Lord Byron.

With this rubbish swimming around in my head I set to work on step 1.

I went directly to hang out with the baddest and most insane kid I could find, to blaze weed, drink stolen rum, and embrace a total lack of restraint in all things.

Terry the Munter became my guide.

Stank brutally. 17 going on 50. Bad teeth. Raised by a drug addict, alcoholic single mother. Personally a drug addict and alcoholic since 13. Wore a faded ripped Metallica shirt and leather pants covered in marks from stubbed-out cigarettes.
I was taking the crash course.

There’s being badass and then there is a point where you become so badass that you get killed by actual badass gangsters. This is that story.

Terry and I crashed a Redneck party. It was a Wedding After-party at a church.

It was a ruralish area outside of West Auckland, which is a pretty feral place. Henderson… if you want to be specific.

We got the bus out there… it took an hour…

Churches in New Zealand are cheap to rent and often used for off-the-hook parties.

How he knew it was happening I don’t know, but it had a band and, like everything out in feral Henderson, it was going to be nuts.

We rocked in—It was a small white church, cars parked haphazardly all over the lawn, people everywhere—totally wrecked… You don’t see this kind of stumbling, screaming, spewing, swearing mess these days, outside of a few rare areas… It was a special time and place...

We sidled in and chilled out by the wall looking for any unattended booze or anything we could steal. The band played, and people moshed. We were just ignored.

The band played “Rage Against the Machine,” FUCK YOU WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!!!” And people went nuts. It was awesome…

Then the craziest shit happened...

A weird-looking skinny dude fully dressed in white—white jeans, a white jacket, a white shirt, and white cowboy boots, and a big white cowboy hat—came out of nowhere and started dancing a weird sexy cowboy dance. Grooving up against any females he could. People were laughing, the girls were laughing and pushing him back… it was just funny to watch…

Then also out of nowhere two hardcore NZ gang members appeared.

This was bad news… they were fully patched members of the Mongrel Mob.

You should do a Google image search of the NZ Mongrel Mob now. So you can get an idea of what this brutalness actually was like.

The back of their leather jackets feature a British bulldog wearing a German Stahlhelm.

One was a massive Maori Guy and the other was a shaved-headed, short stocky white guy. Both with crude tattoos all over their faces.

The white shaved head guy went right up to the Cowboy guy and kicked him so hard in the arse with a big steel-capped boot he seemed to fly through the air. Then before he could get up he kept kicking, and kicking his butt as the poor screaming guy tried to scramble out of the way.

Kicking him all the way up the middle of the church… never letting him up… hat flying… begging… screaming …. utter brutality.

The Maori guy charged into the crowd, smashing people flying, and grabbed one of the church pews. Wielding it in both hands like a huge baton he just spun it about smashing it into people like a total maniac.

They were both obviously out of their minds on booze, weed and speed and this was entertainment to them… people were going down left and right and screaming…something wet hit my face… it was someone’s blood… the band had stopped playing and I grabbed Terry and we fled.

This was too fucked for words.

We started walking down the dark road and decided to hitchhike back to his place in the city—the shitty concrete apartment he shared with his messed up mum… but his room was a cozy stinky sanctuary with Iron Maiden…and he did have a jug of cheap brandy.

A car was coming and we put out the thumb… it was coming pretty fast… but whatever… It slammed on the brakes and pulled to a stop almost hitting us…

It was a small Toyota Corolla two-door hatchback… The door flew open and the big Maori Mongrel Mob guy got out and clicked the seat forward. “Get in, you’re coming to a party.”

Instead of running, idiot Terry says “Sweet” and gets in.

Instead of running, idiot Me just gets in.

And they take off… as fast as it can go…

The radio is up full blast playing some rock radio station through the tiny speakers… It would have been funny if it wasn’t so terrifying … They both held big beer bottles and there was a crate of beer in the back between us with six left. This is how we drank back then. A crate of 12, 750ml bottles of beer. Lion Red… cheap generic.

Lion Red is a New Zealand beer brewed by Lion Breweries in Auckland. The beer is 4.0% alcohol. Because of its relatively low alcohol content it is widely regarded as an excellent ‘session’ beer, that is, a beer that can be consumed freely over a long session of time without all the adverse effects of a higher alcohol volume beer.

Kiwi Piss.

“Have a beer guys!” said the skinhead one.. so we each had a big warm beer…

We are roaring along now… all drinking and silent.

The driver seemed to be kind of blacking out … and the car started dangerously swerving onto the edge of the road…

I decide to say “Bro… look out man… you don’t want to cash your car.”

He says “HAHAHAH, not my car bro I stole it!”

I’m sure we are going to die. So I just pound my warm beer hoping that when we all go through the windscreen I will be relaxed.

Terry is having a great time… he starts singing to the songs on the radio…

Spoiler alert… I didn’t die… we drive for about 20 minutes at this insane speed through the dark and then they turn off the road onto a long gravel driveway and up to…

A big gang-headquarters shed house-party… with dogs everywhere and feral gang women and motorbikes and blasting music...

It seems like they were heading to this party and just stopped in at the church on the way to smash shit up…

They got out and rolled in… forgetting us.

We sat in the car.

Terry gets up and looks like he’s entertaining the idea of going to the party….he said “Let’s…and I cut him off with “FUCK NO.”

“OK then but I’m stealing these beers.”

And so we grabbed the last four beers and snuck out of the car. The only thing that watched us go was a mangy dog… The party was in full swing but no one saw us…

We snuck down the road and started jogging and then running. We got to the main road and the relief was like nothing I have ever experienced. We laughed and walked and drank our massive warm bottles of Lion Red.

Anytime a car came we rolled off into the ditch and lay down flat in case they were coming back to grab us. We walked for about an hour along that rural road. Finally, we were so tired and drunk that we just lay in the grass by a bus stop at the first point of civilization, and waited for the 5:30 am bus to the city.

That was my last foray with maniac Terry, bless his heart. No idea what happened to the guy. I have a fondness for total fucking maniacs. As you have read. There is a reason for this. No matter how bad shit got. No matter how insane I went. No matter how demented the scene… I still knew I wasn’t as bad as them.

I could always hang onto that last rung and, while I might be in the gutter… they were in the drain under that metal grill thing where IT lives, looking up at me and telling me to come down into the drain and play.

And play I did:) As I have said… my mentor taught a rule to live by:

“Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.”

My book is packed with stories like the above!

If you want to send me money because you want to support my writing here :)

buymeacoffee.com/obsidianblackbird

If you like the story and want to support me, subscribe, restack this story and share and buy my book! 500 pages of Gen X storytime goodness.

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Hardcopy

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The above picture is from the Surrealist film ERASERHEAD which features in this tale.

When 16, the kids from my school were taken from our country town in rural New Zealand to the big city of Auckland, where we would be bussed about to various businesses and factories.

The purpose of this trip was to give us an idea of what was waiting upon leaving school.

A nice introduction to the grim, meat-hook realities of working a job you hate to earn money so you can eat and live and buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like.

By this time, attrition had taken its toll on the class numbers.

50% of the kids from the last year’s 15-year-old class had left school and were working on parents’ farms or in a trade school of some kind.

Or some even optioned to live with an older hippie friend and grow weed for a living.

That left about 20 of us.

By the time our 16-year-old class was done, there were about 10 left to enter the 17-year-old class. “University Entrance,” it was called.

I know some kids went on to get a lot out of this trip and went on to learn trades or become nurses and go directly into the “meat grinder of the MAN” as I had been led to believe it was called, by the counterculture books I favored.

Working and trying to get money and be part of society was not for me.

For someone like myself, homelessness, drugs, shivering desperation, and oft-times violent adventure was way more interesting than driving a forklift in the Coca-Cola plant, or trying to do construction, tradespeople, or nurse school or whatever the kids who wanted to be humans were going to do.

One of my friends went to panel beater school, one went to nurse college, another into the air force.

I went to the streets to… be free and to learn how to survive on the streets… because I didn’t want anyone telling me what to do... super smart move.

Kind of knowing that rough times were going to happen to me, I did not pay too much attention to where we went. But I do remember the Coca-Cola factory, Saatchi & Saatchi advertising offices… and an art school.

I just want to detail some crazy shit that went down on this six-day trip.

First thing, we were all put up in the Auckland YHA hostel.

The hostel stands at the top of Queen Street, Auckland NZ. Still there!

My room far left bottom.

Note the grey skies. It is NOT sunny in New Zealand. Most of the year it’s cold, rainy, and shitty. Don’t be fooled by our tourist propaganda. ( Below )

See the above? It’s actually about to piss down in about ten minutes, and the rain will have bits of ice in it. Enjoy.

I was in a room on the bottom floor. I chose that room because I had a plan.

The first crazy thing that happened was that we went to an art college, and while the other kids were being shown about, I took off and found the most twisted-looking students to talk to. I regaled them with my funny stories… asking questions about parties, counterculture books, and so on.

In my mind, I had it built up that this art college was going to be like something out of ’60s Berkeley, San Francisco… but the guys I talked to didn’t really know what I was talking about… It was 1993, and we were in New Zealand after all…

Then one guy said, “I know something you would like, you’re crazy so you might get it,” and took me to a small, totally dark AV room, where he put a VHS on for me.

It was ERASERHEAD.

YES. This is what I needed. The mental equivalent of an apple corer to the psyche.

A touchstone with which to resonate with the other freaks I would meet one day.

If you don’t know what ERASERHEAD is, you can search it up…

Here’s a small blurb:
David Lynch’s masterful direction, impeccable cinematography, and experimental music and sound design all work together to create a surreal and unforgettable cinematic experience. While not for the faint of heart, Eraserhead is a film that rewards those willing to take the plunge into its dark and dreamlike world.

I took the plunge into its dark and dreamlike world… I came out forever changed.

I finished the movie just as the rest of the group finished the tour, and I quietly entered the bus last.

Mentally shifted.

There was a new world. Something I hadn’t even seen before.

Surrealism!

This was HOW I FELT. Now it had a name.

As you can see from my other stories, I had had so many whackdoodle experiences in my life, that I was now just a thing. I resembled a ’90s teenager in physical form only.

My personality was so fragmented, that I didn’t exist to myself. I sought out two things: intense crazy experiences and sense gratification.

Like a reverse Buddhist. A hedonist sybarite hobo-freak?

Well, this movie did it. A portrayal of a world to match my mind.

I stared out the window.

Nothing was real. And little mattered. It was an illusion now.

A canvas for me to paint on.

What is truth?

That night I went to bed early, making a big deal about having a headache.

I needn’t have bothered, no one cared. The bad kids were planning to meet up at midnight and sneak up to the hang-out spot on the roof with the foreign backpackers and drink the devastating gallon of cheap port one of them had stolen from their parents. That seemed dazzlingly lame to me.

My regular friends were distant from me, as I had been acting weirder than usual.

One of my other friends (He of the glowing condom) was also acting weird and hanging out with the new tall horsey-faced girl who wore floral print dresses.

I had a mastermind plan for this trip.

So I got to my room. I put on a set of what I thought were cool city-man clothes.

Stonewash grey jeans, a white shirt, my old boarding school tie. By rubbing a dark soft art pencil on paper till it made a large pool of black and, applying it to my face, I made a passable five o’clock shadow.

My only footwear was my black NZ army boots. But I had shined them up real good with KIWI polish and, by putting the jeans OVER them, they kind of just looked like big black shoes. Topped with a trilby.

A trilby is a narrow-brimmed type of hat. The trilby was once viewed as the rich man's favored hat; in Britain and was frequently seen at the horse races.

I was now a dapper man about town!

I had saved up $200 ($430 in today’s money) from mowing lawns over the last year, and now I was going to wax the fucking lot! Striding about this city like a latter-day dandy!

I squeezed out the room’s window and, hanging onto the sill, dropped the last foot to the pavement and took off.

First off, I just wandered, sucking in the sights and sounds of vibrant but quiet Queen Street, Auckland. The tiny civilized core of New Zealand.

THE QUEEN OF STREETS!

After exploring, I stopped at TONY’S STEAKHOUSE for dinner. It was located down a thin street that ran parallel to Queen Street (Lorne Street).

I wanted a nice steak at a small table in the corner.

The real “man essence” of eating a big steak.

“How would I like it cooked?”

“Blackened—No blood.”

Cue a frown from the waiter.

He goes to the kitchen.

Cue chef coming out and looking at me in the corner.

Cue other kitchen staff coming out and having a laugh at me.

I heard… “….some weird kid…”

The chef sent over a massive glass of wine on the house.

I raised it in thanks to the laughing staff.

This night was getting good.

Leaving satisfied, wine-buzzed, and happy and not having to tip because it’s New Zealand, and thus I didn’t even KNOW what tipping was… I popped into a shop and bought a pack of Camels.

Having never smoked before, it made total sense to start with something strong and cool.

This I could do legally. 16 was the smoking age. But it didn’t matter, no shopkeeper gave a shit anyway.

Blazing up a harsh Camel, I cruised about watching the nightlife.

Now with my wine brain, steak guts, and Camel baccy high, I thought how nice it would be to find a bohemian café and have some dessert and a coffee and blaze more smokes… maybe have a whiskey, like a real-man sophisticate.

I found such a place on the High Street. The fashion store, and high-end café street.

The swankiest street in NZ. All 100 yards of it.

I sat at one of the tables outside and had four espressos. One after another, while blazing Camels and watching the world go by.

When I started to feel like I was having mini heart attacks, I tried ordering a whiskey…

The waiter was cool… probably about 25, but not fooled by my get-up… he looked back into the café, paused, and said in a low conspiratorial tone… “I can get you a Fernet… it will look like a Coke.”

“YES!”

I didn’t know what a Fernet was, but I was to find that it was a type of bitter, aromatic spirit, made from a number of herbs and spices including myrrh, rhubarb, chamomile, cardamom, aloe, and saffron, with a base of distilled grape spirits. Italian.

Wow.

And so my love of bitter herbal booze was born.

I sat there sipping on this massive glass of iced Fernet.

Watching the high-class Aucklanders go by.

1993. A simpler time.

Smokes in hand instead of phones.

Steak, wine, Camel smokes, espressos, and now a big glass of Fernet.

Mashed but sophisticated. The lobes were HUMMING.

I was chilling at a boho café while the other kids were hiding from the teachers in the hostel drinking stolen wino port like a bunch of muddled babies.

Only one thing could make this better.

Something I had been planning all year: SEX.

Now, prostitution is legal and regulated in New Zealand. It was the first country to fully decriminalize sex work. I knew this. It was part of health class. We were very well educated on these things.

The history of sex work in NZ was taught to us right along with terrifying videos of abortions and condom use demonstrations.

I also knew where the bordellos were located. Jack Kerouac taught me that word: bordellos.

They were upscale places down off the bottom of Queen Street on a street called Fort Street. A long side street with upmarket strip clubs and high-end cat houses.

An older friend had told me all about how good it was.

Maybe seeking to justify his frequenting?

“The ladies are taken care of, they make about 20 times more money than they would if they were working in a supermarket, they are having a great time and doctors check them. It’s all safe sex and it’s very high-brow.”

Is this true? Sometimes yes… and sometimes it’s 10 Chinese students that were sent to NZ by their parents to study at our university, that no longer study, aren’t going back to China, and now all live in a flat like rats, doing meth in between $20 Johns.

I headed down to Fort Street, which had a section that served as a high-end red light district back then. Down at the bottom to the right of Queen Street.

I went up the stairs of the nicest-looking one… let’s call it the “Lords Club” and buzzed the brass buzzer. Someone looked through the peephole and then the door was opened by a good-looking blond older woman in a tiger print bodysuit and high-heeled boots.

Classy.

“Hello, darling. Aren’t you a sweetheart. Come on in.”

I was taken into the entry room of the bordello. I was now panicking. The room took on a fishbowl-like appearance.

“I have a really sweet girl, who will take great care of you and you’re going to want an hour. That will be $100, dear.”

I now realize this was a ploy to drive me off, as she knew I shouldn’t have been there, and thought I was probably wasting her time.

But I counted out a handful of battered lawnmower-earned fives and tens and said, “Awesome.”

Her eyebrows shot up and she took me through the door to a very nice lounge with a bar and a TV playing music videos.

There were two girls in the room. One freaky black-haired Eastern European-looking one, blazing a long thin smoke and sitting with her arms crossed and her crossed leg swinging like a metronome… wearing a small black dress…

And a plump smiling girl with short red hair, in jeans and a NIRVANA SHIRT!

The lady of the house took me to the red-haired gal and introduced us.

She led me off down the hall to an amazing room, wooden-paneled with mirrors and an ensuite shower/bathroom, and a fake fireplace heater.

It had a double bed covered in red velvet and heart-shaped pillows.

I’m a chatty one… and was pretty nervous.

She had me have a shower as I yammered away.

She was smiling and I think she genuinely liked me. I washed the pencil beard off and we sat on the bed and talked. I found out all about her, though at first she said, “I don’t talk about my life with clients.”

I said, “I’m not a client. I’m just a cool guy sitting on this bed with you.”

This made her laugh. Also now thinking about it… cry a tiny bit.

She wasn’t from a broken home. There was no history of abuse or drugs. Just this story.

Her dad had died naturally when she was 16, as he was a much older guy than her mum. Her mum knew what she did and was fine with it.

She had been going to beauty school from 17 but it was hard, and she said, “I’m not smart. I was always real shit at school.” Then she saw some of her older friends graduate and only be able to get jobs for about ten dollars an hour working for mean-as-fuck stick-skinny bitches, doing the worst jobs like waxing old ladies’ minges.

I think to us, old ladies meant 35…Her friends hated their lives in the beauty industry.

She was smart enough to know that that was a shit dead end. One of her friends, who was a “working girl” on the side of being at beauty school, introduced her to this.

So after flunking a class, she dropped out of beauty school… and that was a year ago.
She was now 19.

She now makes about 1000 dollars a week. That was BONKERS money back in NZ in ’93. ($2500 today) She was saving up for a house and already had 35K.

She said that they only let good guys into the Lords. The Lords Club was high-class and priced to keep out the riff-raff. No drunks, no bogans (rednecks), and no dodgy old men.

Mostly young wealthy guys and older businessmen. And of course one sixteen year old adventurer!

We talked for ages, laughing and trading stories. Till there was one solitary knock on the door.

“That means only 5 minutes left.” she said with a pouting frown. We had been talking the whole time!

I said, “Don’t worry! That’s all the time in need! ;) … … … …”

Before leaving I gave her the rest of my money, which was about another $40, and she gave me a big hug. I strode out of there like a demented rooster. The madame smiled at me and kind of laughed as I strutted out. I was smiling so wide my face almost broke.

I strutted up Queen Street feeling like a king. I was alive. I had lived more life in the last 4 hours than in many years prior. I got back to the hostel and leaped up, grabbed the sill, and pulled myself into the window.

I got changed into my regular grunge teen outfit and headed out into the hall to the bathrooms to take a piss.

Catching my friend (the guy hanging out with the new tall horsey-faced girl who wore floral print dresses) coming out of one of the gal’s rooms.

He doesn’t see me… he stops in the hallway and smells his hand.
I knew what that meant! I had been smelling MY hand for the last 30 minutes!

“Bro! You’ve been hiding in her room, banging Betsy Mae!” (Not her real name).

“Yip.”

“What happened with the party?”

“Those spazes got so drunk; Dylan spewed in the hallway, and Jess fell down the stairs and they got busted and now they are all in deep shit.”

“Idiots. Wow… I’ve been out on the town…”

“Nice. I’m crashing. Night.”

“Night.”

I realized I couldn’t bring myself to tell him or anyone what I had done.

But now… now I have.

I ground out the last week of school and rolled out of my town. Thank you to that gal, that night meant a lot to me. You are out there somewhere… now 52 years old or older... Once it was just you and me together in that wooden-paneled room.

No phones in sight. Just kids having a good time.

This song, “Beauty School Dropout,” from the musical Grease, messed me up when I heard it later in life. And Ill share it here now….

Beauty school dropout
No graduation day for you
Beauty school dropout
Missed your mid-terms and flunked shampoo
Well, at least you could have taken time
To wash and clean your clothes up
After spending all that dough
To have the doctor fix your nose up

Baby, get movin’ (better get movin’)
Why keep your feeble hopes alive?
What are you provin’? (What are you provin’)
You’ve got the dream but not the drive

Beauty school dropout (beauty school dropout)
Hanging around the corner store
Beauty school dropout (beauty school dropout)
It’s about time you knew the score
Well, they couldn’t teach you anything
You think you’re such a looker
But no customer would go to you
Unless you were a hooker…

My book is packed with stories like the above!

If you want to send me money because you want to support my writing here :)

buymeacoffee.com/obsidianblackbird

If you like the story and want to support me, subscribe, restack this story and share and buy my book! 500 pages of Gen X storytime goodness.

BUY THE BOOK !!

Kindle

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FVVFHZTS?tag=bk00010a-20&th=1&psc=eniuslink=true

Hardcopy

https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=qpgeD35Sbj5Uk5XRfEycCkaS1djAkDiZDZQX01Q4hN4

Thanks for reading Memories of a Post Grunge Drifter.! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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This was the coveted Fourth Form ski trip that the class spent half the year fundraising for.

Of course, it took place in August… Winter in New Zealand.

About 40 of us 14-year-olds were bussed down to the mountain from our country town 6 hours away and we stayed in some sort of huge lodge on the mountain.We all were outfitted with skis. Snowboarding was very new and openly mocked

“Gays on trays”.

I didn’t want to be a Gay on a Tray, so I did not push the idea of getting a snowboard.

It went as you can imagine. A few kids got so sunburned their skin peeled off. Ankles were broken. Skiing was done.Some of the weaker kids quit after finding it too hard on day one and spent the rest of the trip back at the Lodge playing cards. Those nerds were teased mercilessly. I found myself skiing alone most of the time… but I learned fast and spent day after day whizzing down the mountain.

On one of the nights back at the Lodge, I spotted a huge 1-kilo bag of instant coffee. I thought “I wonder what effect that would have if sprinkled on the snow?” So I stole it and the next morning stashed it in my jacket. In the morning on the ride up the chairlift and with no one in the few chairs behind me, I opened up the bag and wafted out the contents onto the ski field below me. A wind picked up the brown dust and blew it into the shape of a large cloud.As each tiny crystal of instant coffee hit the snow it bloomed into a vivid brown shit stain.

To my horror, it spread and spread and spread to the snow below. The shit stain was gigantic. Like 4 football fields worth. My eyes bugged out at what I had done.

I just carried on with my skiing…. feeling detached and ghost-like. I skied through the giant shit stain, observing people’s stunned reactions to it. When I got to the bottom of the run, I looked back and saw that as people were skiing through it, they were tracking long brown skid marks down the mountain. I heard one of the lift guys say, in response to a question…

“Some fuckwit genius dumped a bunch of instant coffee on the mountain, it will look like shit for days, until the next big snow.”

I was that fuckwit genius. It was there for the rest of the trip becoming sadder, dirtier, and more diffuse. I would see bits of brown snow tracked into shops, and down in the mud room of the lodge… poopy reminders of my crime.

Two years later at school, we were talking about how much of an amazing trip that was. Someone said “Yeah and remember that big shit stain that appeared on the mountain?”

I decided to confess…

“It was me. I emptied a big bag of instant coffee on the mountain that I stole from the lodge.”

No one believed me. By that time at school, my reputation was firmly entrenched as a bullshit artist, as what I said was often so outlandish.

No one believed me. Wow. Maybe one of them will read this 33 years later… and believe me now. I read this to my son and asked,

“Would you do something this naughty?”

He said, “No, I would wait for someone else to do it”. That makes me a bit sad.

I need to start being a worse parent.

My book is packed with stories like the above!

If you want to send me money because you want to support my writing here :)

buymeacoffee.com/obsidianblackbird

If you like the story and want to support me, subscribe, restack this story and share and buy my book! 500 pages of Gen X storytime goodness.

BUY THE BOOK !!

Kindle

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FVVFHZTS?tag=bk00010a-20&th=1&psc=eniuslink=true

Hardcopy

https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=qpgeD35Sbj5Uk5XRfEycCkaS1djAkDiZDZQX01Q4hN4

ME channeling Christian Slater. I based 40% of my personality on his Heathers Character JD.

Mid 90s.

The scene for this story, is the same as many of my stories.

Small town rural New Zealand in the mid 90s.

I was an out of place super enthusiastic child and teen, prone to singing, organizing plays and acrobatic dancing… I was at that time trying to be intelligent… and beat. Which, of course, back then meant “faggot”.

If you spoke a line of poetry or sang out loud, or did a little dance, at my rural school in NZ back in ’92, you may as well be wearing a dress.

It was awesome to be called a faggot when one piped up with a borderline sane non-arsehole opinion on something…

Also, I liked to be happy and sing and talk to people. Classic Fag.

I stand as the guy who has been called a faggot the most on planet Earth.
Easily 10 times a day for about 6 years straight. Maybe not so much on weekends…

Also, “You fuck goats” was a common one.

I was being enthusiastic and entertaining in order to attract women…. however I was in the wrong time and place. When I hit the big city after leaving that rural town I was a massive hit with the ladies. Washing it off in the sink, between enthusiastic partners levels of hit. Gross I know, but I’m just saying what happened and these memories, and a box of real photos, are all us 50 year old Gen X, ex Lotharios have. So chill out.

OK… what am I going on about? …oh yeah…

Because I was often the center of attention, alive and entertaining I had basically been cancelled as a person. This meant from a young age I was not invited to kids birthdays, because I would invent games and create something that was more fun than what the parents created. And then the party would be about my crazy shit, and not the birthday boys thing.

On learning I had been socially shadow banned from birthday society, I complained to my mother. she said “Don’t worry, we will have our own fun.”

To which I replied “FUCK OUR OWN FUN!”

I wanted to party with other people.

This shadow banning continued into my teens, where no one would tell me about any house parties that were going on, so I couldn’t show up and make it my special brand of crazy. It was only the upper strata cliquey kids that hated me, and made it cool to hate me. There were about four of them. To the masses I was their jester with love and jokes and stories for everyman, but many were wary of being caught talking to me or laughing at my jokes. Like a Rural Heathers…In which I was JD.

This left only the schools non-persona grata to hang with unblocked.

The broken home kids, the mutated, the twisted, the druggie metal heads, the super white trash, and the nerdy beyond all belief.

I would still find these parties and get to them and watch with glee the grimaces of anger on the clique kids faces on my arrival. And the eye rolls at my bizarre outfits, designed to cause shocking cringe in all who saw. One of my favorites… was a kilt, boots spray-pained day glow orange, a homemade print shirt featuring a picture of a breast with the word TIT under it, a gold disco jacket and a small traffic cone as a hat.

Anyway when I was 16 there was going to be a party for the ages.

It was the four top Clique kids birthdays and their parents had got the Fire Station for a venue. There was going to be a supervised keg and a big lamb spit roast on and the best sound system and lights and almost everyone was invited… except for of course…The broken home kids, the mutated, the twisted, the druggie metalheads , the super white trash, and the nerdy beyond all belief…. and me.

I was devastated… and the FOMO crushed me. It haunted my thoughts non stop. I was informed obliquely that I would not be let in, as there was going to be a bouncer on the door to make sure that only the people invited come, so I was told to not even try.

So when the night of the party came I dressed in my plaid shirt, long dark blue trench coat, my army boots and my stussy Beret as you can see in this photo from that year.

Behind the Firestation was a park with a creek running through it and a bunch of trees.

Sadly I sat under these trees, hiding… and watching the party. I consoled myself with sips from a jar. I had stolen a few fingers of Drambuie, from my old man.

I was having my own fun… and it was very very sad.

As the sun went down the party cranked up and I heard kids laughing and singing along to Ace of Base and MC Hammer… I could see them dancing and drinking beer through the windows…

Then I saw someone coming towards me through the bush. It was another outcast.

“Boshy no-washy” a white trash kid from the really poor part of town, who wore the same pants every day. He had a half a box of beer stolen from his passed out mum.

He took his place next to me in the bushes… watching but now I was slightly less sad.

Soon other kids arrived… every single one of the the broken home kids, the mutated, the twisted, the druggie metalheads, the super white trash, and the nerdy beyond all belief. Yes even the total geek red headed math autism spaz was there in a goddam suit for some reason. Most showed up with some sort of bizarre stolen oddball bit of booze, from the back of parents cupboards.

The druggie heavy metal kids rolled up wearing Pantera and Metallica T-shirts and they had brought two guitars and a massive bag of fucking weed and this big homemade bong made out of bamboo!

Normally few of these kids ever spoke to each other but here we were together - Outcasts together strong! It wasn’t even weird. Everyone was acting like we were all best mates!

It was like, this was the time and place we were all going to make our outcast stand against all that was conservative and cliquey. I like to believe that I was the magical nucleus of this gathering. I had made the decision to go to that park and have my own fun the moment I found I wasn’t invited. I like to feel I gave out some kind of freakazoid siren call to the dispossessed and unwelcome…

We came out of the bushes and set up under some trees in the park and started HAVING OUR OWN FUN!

The heavy metal kids were playing Metal song after Metal song on their acoustic guitars, ( Lots of Metallica, Pantera and Black Sabbath ) they shared the bong around to everyone, even suited math spaz took a puff to everyone’s cheering. All the booze was shared around as well so no one went un buzzed.

I provided the dancing and acrobatic entertainment, as I could do actual back flips, which people loved to see.

Then one of the metal head kids busted out a hacky sack! And we were a hacky sack playing all singing all dancing circle of connection and joy.

(Tears are streaming down my face as I remember this)

All of a sudden there were three kids from the party… standing close by watching us.

We invited them into our circle of togetherness and fun. They were bagging on the party. Apparently the parents were running a tight ship and you were only allowed 1 beer an hour, with food.

Metal Kid #3 said “How the fuck are you gunna get smashed if you do that?”

Soon more kids from the party came out, drawn like moths… to our awesome fun.

One of them then went back in and stole a box of beers from the party and brought it to us. A crazy big girl called “Messy Jessy” went in and store a huge plate of lamb meat, which we devoured with our hands shrieking and baying like animals.

When they went back to refuel, they were informed by the clique kids parents that if anyone leave the party they will not be allowed back in. It was now a lame ass LOCK IN!

Well that fucking did it. Within an hour - EVERY SINGLE KID except the 4 kids whos birthday it was and few of their closest friends were in the Firestation, taking turns to sadly look out the windows at us. Now they were the dumb cunts having “their own fun.”

Eventually the lead dipshit fire marshal dad came out and told us that we cant be in the park drinking and making all that noise… he was red-faced and defeated… even a bit scared looking.

We screamed with laughter and I said “ Lets take this party to the beach!! Let’s have a

fucking beach party !!” The beach was 10 minutes away.

And so it was like some kind of kiwi rural pied piper I led about 40 cheering screaming kids to the beach were we had a big fire, which I did flying dive rolls over. We danced and sang and I hooked up with Messy Jessy and all was well in the world.

And that is how I WON LIFE AND CRUSHED MY SCHOOL ENEMIES AT 16.

20 years later I received a facebook message from one of the Clique kids.

“Hey… dont know if you will get this but remember that party that we had at the fire station that you didn’t get invited to? I wanted to invite you. I also told the other guys that If we didn’t invite you, you would find some way to get us back, because you were so crazy back then. When we looked out the window and saw you doing flips and shit, I knew we were fucked. But for what it’s worth, Im sorry.”

I replied.

Bro! You should have come out and partied with us. It’s all good. And for the record I’m much crazier now.

—

A month ago I went back to my home town with my 14 year old son and sat in the exact position under the exact tree where I sat sadly sipping my stolen jar of Drambuie. A solitary tear rolled down my face and my boy said “DAD!! Why are you crying?” I said “ A very special thing happened here, at this exact point in the universe 34 years ago.”

I stood up, and to the horror of my sheltered child, in my best Drexel Spivey voice I yelled at the fire station

“THIS IS WHAT YOU GET IF YOU FUCK WITH ME!!! DO YOU HEAR ME WHITE BOY!!”

— I love you guys… always have… always will.

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There is a picture of a cave that is used on many many desktop screens these days

That cave is Cathedral Cove in my Hometown.

That picture was a shock for me when it started staring out from office desktop lock screens.

On the clear star-studded New Year’s night of 98, at 22 years of age, I spent the night in that cave with a 33-year-old fun time gal from Norway. (Fun Time gal: A young woman who engages in partying and romantic liaisons.)

I made it romantic as all get out, with ten tall candles stuck in the sand and a nice big blanket.

Decades later when I saw that picture while working in corporate America and tried to tell fellow cube peeps of that wonderful night, pointing out exact areas on the screen where the good times were had, they would get uncomfortable.

But I didn’t care. I wanted them to think of me and my Norway Gal every time their computer booted up… I wouldn’t say Norway Gal though I would use 90s Kiwi slang for a Nordic. “UCTEN BUCKEN”.

“Yeah me and this hot blond Ucten Buckten…”

“What is an UCTEN BUCKTEN…?? The confused Californian would ask…

“You know … a Norwegian or Swedish…

“You can’t say Ucten Buckten, in America.”

“But can’t I say anything I like in America? Isn’t that what this country is all about?

The Freedom of speech thing?”

I act dumb, they keep explaining why freedom of speech isn’t really freedom of speech.…

I get them to admit that NZ is freer than America because I can say Ucten Buckten there, and people laugh instead of getting mad and giving hour-long lectures at work to the immigrants instead of making their rich boss richer like they are supposed to.

Good times…

I digress…. this story is about school trips.

Mine was a rural school in New Zealand.
The school was what was called an Area School. Which meant ages 5 to 17/18.

If you lived in this town from a young age you went to school all through your childhood and teens with pretty much the same people.

This created a certain demented situation where you all wind up kind of like a giant gang of brothers and sisters who mostly hate each other. Which becomes awkward when you want to start banging each other. So you mostly don’t. The girls in your class are going for guys 2 -3 years older than you so your shit out of luck anyway.

So at 12 years old, your class goes on a Lord of the Flysish camping trip around the Peninsula our town was on. It’s a rural but super touristy place in summer.

The trip was called the “Round the Peninsula trip.” Genius.

Now in retrospect, these trips were often towards the end of the year, and on any misbehavior, the culprit would be warned that they were putting their trip at risk!

If the whole class was getting rowdy we could all be immediately smashed under control by the teacher yelling “At this point, NO ONE in this class is going on the trip!

Bad kids would toe the line right up when they were ON the trip when they would go all out, in an explosion of pent-up naughtiness! It’s this naughtiness I will be detailing in these story’s as well as some of the more interesting or funny things that happened.

I will start with the first trip.

THE ROUND THE PENINSULA TRIP.

Ok so I do remember being a weird loner on this trip.
I had come back to this school at 12 years old just for the last few months of the year.

And I was a Crazed Mystic Shaman.

The reason for this is that my mother in her great and deep wisdom thought it was a good idea to send me to boarding school for two years ( As detailed in the Boarding School Saga Stories) while she lived in an ashram at the top of the Ganges river in India.

On returning to New Zealand she then thought it very wise to take my 10-year-old sister and 12-year-old me, on a Ten month New Age journey with an American group run by a Hawaiian Kahuna and a Native American Medicine woman.

A New Age super quest for rich white seekers. I found out later that this all-inclusive new-age super quest was about 100K.

I just may be getting into the “100K spirit quest journey” game one day as the Guru… I’ll let you know…
How this worked was that we traveled around New Zealand and Australia and lived with Native tribes. In this case the Maori of East Coast New Zealand and the Aboriginal tribes of Uluru and Mullumbimby Australia.

Months and months of shamanic quests, Sacred Mountain climbs, pray fests, screaming heals, Naked fire dances, sweat lodges, Moonlight silent walks, solitary bush sleeps, waterfall jumps, Icy River freezy plunges and prayer stick workshops left twelve-year-old me forever changed.

All of this directly after two years of a very strict boarding school where I went from my bed to class to the rugby field on a loop. The monotony only broken by the occasional vicious corporal punishment.

By the time I got back to the human realm, I was in some kind of super whackadoodle woo woo spiritual orbit.

I had done shit and seen shit that few twelve-year-olds have, but you know what… It was a lot of fun. The food was good and the Maori and Aboriginal kids were really fun to play with. Sometimes the adults were gone all day so you were free to wander about in the outback and get bitten by inch-long ants.

But what I really LOVED was watching grown adults absolutely lose their shit, while doing these spirit quest things.

The high-strung yanks particularly.

I still find that to be one of my favorite pastimes.

But anyway… I’m at this school now and I’m as weird as fuck because I keep saying shit like “I can sense that you’re crying inside, Bradley. If you were just truthful with yourself and others you would heal.”

The response to my weird shit would be “Fuck off with your faggot talk, homo!”.

I learned fast to keep my stupid shaman mouth shut. I was in a new tribe now.

And so with this new tribe of kids I went on the trip. Driving in the bus to various campsites and camping. The parents and teachers cooked for us. It was like scouts but with no activities or supervision and the teachers and parents drinking and blazing a little weed at night.

I remember a lot of beach walks and bush walks. This I was good at.

I decided I was just going to spend my time hiding up trees and observing the other kids… to try to learn from their behavior and figure out how to fit in.

Two things I remember.

Bradley (Who I knew was crying inside) mixed up a bunch of aspirins in a bottle of coke and drank it, in a sort of weird pill overdose fake cry-for-help thing. He made a big deal about it and then just spewed and cried. And then faked losing his voice and became a lame mime for two days.

When some well-meaning kid told on him, the teacher asked that kid if Bradley seemed like he was going to die...

The kid says “I don’t think so...” and the teacher just shrugged.

The other crazy thing that happened on this trip was, that while I was hiding up a tree, I saw one of the bigger twelve-year-olds throw something in the bushes.

I yelled down “Yo! What was that?

And he looked up and yelled

“A condom. I just fucked Jessica.”

A condom? Fucked? What the fuck is going on? Aren’t, we supposed to be twelve.

I hadn’t gotten the memo that this is rural NZ and the Maoris grow up way faster than whitey.

I imagined this taller tough half Maori kid on top of Jesica the tall Maori girl in one of the tents.

Having sex right after talking about the A team and eating burgers at the picnic table with the other kids…

Starwipe to two years later Jessica is one of FOUR fourteen-year-old girls in my class, with big pregnant bellies trying to lean forward far enough to do their maths…

One was a mentally twisted pointy-faced white girl who was always telling sexual jokes, the other three were Maori girls.

They would stay in school, preggers till about 7 months in, then disappear.

Then a few months later they would roll up at lunch time with the baby to show everyone.

A simpler better time I recon.

I just was in the mash with the rest of them…

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So there I was, a young man. 1988. Cambridge NZ.
A skinny glasses-wearing weirdo, wandering cold cloisters.

Tormented by bigger kids, beaten … not too badly… but enough.

Never seriously injured but was often threatened with a lasting injury.

The taunts flicks, kicks, and slaps stung, and these combined with the vicious corporal punishment being dealt out, (sometimes deserved sometimes not) formed a powerful mixture of hate in my belly that needed release.

So that I did not go on any sort of indiscriminate rampage and get even more beatings, or was expelled, I invented the “Three times the Skull” system.

The System was as follows:

If I was slighted by an individual I would calmly walk up to my bedroom cubicle – sometimes holding back tears, sometimes not.

I would open the secret slit of my mattress and take out a small blood-red notebook. In the notebook I would write the offender’s name and next to the name I would write a black Skull and Crossbones.
This would start a wind into the sails of my wicked pirate-style vengeance.

If you refused to share treats with me, you got a skull.
If you farted on me or hit me you got one or two skulls- depending on the hardness of the hit or the smelliness of the fart.
If you taunted me or made fun of me you got a skull.
If you told on me resulting in me getting detention, that was a three-skull offense.
If you told on me resulting in me getting THE WHACK you immediately earned yourself ten skulls…
If I saw you bullying someone I liked you got a skull.

And if you wouldn’t get off the trampoline when it was my turn you got a skull.
There were other one to three skull offenses but these were often decided on the spot.

The reverse was also true – if you gave me things or were kind – (and you had skulls on record) I would remove skulls depending on the size of the kindness.
This was all done secretly and I did not tell a soul of this sinister log of merits and demerits until the writing of this tale.
So what was this all about? Why all the meticulous record keeping?

I learned that I was far too impatient to wait for God or the Universe to balance things out… and due to my burgeoning God Complex, it was necessary to take matters of balance into my own hands.

Well… one of two things would then happen. If you got to three skulls I would secretly and in ninja-like style, mete out what I called the mini punish.
But If you needed to be really brought low I would wait until you had accumulated ten skulls then deliver the BIG punish.
I know you want to know what happened then … And which offenders I brought righteous wrath down upon, and the shape and heat of said wrath.
As well as the speed at which it fell and the weight it contained…
And so I shall tell…

I well remember the glee that would rise and soar within me upon the design, development, and execution of a fitting punishment.

The time I inflicted a mini punish of holding in my farts and only releasing them into one offender’s pillow for a period of some days. He was heard to remark that his pillow had “gone rotten somehow” and it had to be thrown away. But not before he had inhaled the lingering aroma of my reeking chuff gas over a good series of nights.

The time I inflicted the mini punish of a urine-filled plastic bag bomb hurled wrathfully ( and secretly!) down onto a small group of three skullers, from a high window.

The many mini punishes of telling bigger older more dangerous kids that I had heard the offender was calling them a faggot or saying they had aids. This would result in the offender being threatened or punched and often crying in terror or pain.

As a side note, for some reason back in 88, the main insult was to call someone a faggot, or to say they had aids. A kid could be reduced to blubbering near suicidal rubble by implying that they had aids and everyone pretending as such… and thus keeping away from them.

Social media harassment has nothing on 60 kids deciding that some kid no one likes has aids and all treating them as such.

Then there was the time when a good mini punish went bad … I attempted to inflict the mini punish of hiding an offender’s gym clothes so he would get detention when he didn’t have them for the morning run. While I gleefully hid his clothes deep at the bottom of the lost property bin, a Tutor was observing me. When I turned and saw him looking at me I almost fainted dead away! My good mini punish had gone horribly wrong.
He strode over to the bin and liberated the tracksuit. “MMMM … What do you have against Jamieson?” He said, looking at the name tag. “I was angry with him for repeatedly being mean to me – but it’s ok I’m not now.” I gibbered. “Here, I’ll go give them back to him.”
“Oh no- there is nothing we can do – it’s in the House Master’s hands now…” He said.
Instantly earning him the highest form of little red book award: A BIG RED SKULL WITH DAGGERS INSTEAD OF BONES, DRIPPING BLOOD, AND EXUDING EVIL RED LIGHTNING.
I think this meant that at some point in the future, I would have to kill all his pets, his entire family, and all his friends, utterly destroy everything he owned, then slowly torture him to death in the most painful way, trap his soul in a magical torture box and then erase any record of him ever existing, in this universe or any other.
A task I am yet to complete…

He went off to give Jamieson his tracksuit, and later when I saw Jamieson, Jamieson told me matter-of-factly “You’re probably going to get three of the BEST.”
This caused me to drop into quite a terrified state, and go straight to the bathroom with diarrhea.

I did receive one Claudius WHACK, for what I did.

Jamieson immediately qualified for a ten-skull punish, consisting of being “accidentally” tripped down a flight of stairs a month later, while he tried to race me. He fractured his collarbone and spent three days in hospital.

As running inside was a WHACKABLE offense he had to say he had slipped while walking.

I remember well another good Ten skull. I can’t remember the name of the kid who received this punish or even what he did to me, but I bet he deserved it.
There was a tall and dangerous-looking cactus by the gym, with long purple and brown spines that would hurt like a bastard if they pricked you – resulting in swelling and pain in the pricked area.
I crafted a good blowpipe out of two straws from the cafeteria and made a poison paste by drying the greenish-yellow goop that was inside the cactus, into a horrid dark gunge. I poked tiny holes near the tip of a long and dangerous spine, to hold the poison paste better.
With my weapon concealed ninja style, I hung around the kid and his friends asking if they had seen the wasp that was buzzing around the area.
Of course, they hadn’t as the wasp was still within my blowpipe.
When the kid’s attention was suitably distracted – WHOOOP!
I shot the spine dart into his leg! Getting him in the kneecap! Having already freaked them with an imaginary wasp, I used the confusion of his pained cry to pretend to see the wasp, and leaping forward knocked the dart from his knee and cast it into the grass in the fashion of pretending to shoo a wasp away.
It didn’t seem to hurt him much at first and they returned to their playing.
By dinner time though he was limping slightly and I, in my morbid fascination was unable to leave his side.

The next day his limp was pronounced and a large red welt had appeared. By dinner time that night, the welt had redness that covered his entire knee and he was feeling a bit weak and feverish. Getting a little worried I had him seek the advice of the Matron.

I took him there myself as the symptoms were starting to worry me.

Painful injury was fine, but at 10 years old I wasn’t quite ready to be a murderer.

I explained to the Matron my sighting of the stinging wasp, how the poison was probably spreading, how he must be allergic, and that hopefully, she could heal my friend.
I had started to become friends with this kid now over the day and no longer wanted him to die.
She rubbed some sort of ointment on it and sent us on our way.

Checking on him first thing in the morning revealed he had vomited over the side of the bed in the night, pooped his pajamas a little, and now had a raging fever, a purple pus-filled knee and the rest of his leg had swollen like an elephants!

There were dangerous and angry-looking red lines radiating out from his kneecap like a miniature sun and not unlike a sun, the knee was also giving off its own weird heat!

I was starting to feel a little sick myself.

No matter what I did I could not get myself to believe that a simple wasp had done this…

The Matron was called (not by me as I had gone wholly unreal on the guy now and couldn’t even look at him) and he was rushed to hospital.

I walked zombie-like to the cactus by the gym and rammed both of my hands into the spines, thinking that if I was somehow punished for my crime he would get better. I pressed the spines deep into my palms and let out little crying kiddy screams of misery and pain. Every time I wanted to pull back, I would just think of the knee and push harder. I did this till blood was streaming out of the punctures and the poison was making my hands feel like beach balls filled with stinging bees.

The garden began to go dreamlike and I started blacking out from the pain and so I pulled my hands off the spines and clasped them together in a small spray of blood, then knelt to pray at the foot of the diabolical cactus that had caused all this.

Dear GOD! If you heal him and make him better, I will always be good and never do anything to harm anyone ever again.

The kid did get better after a week in the hospital. And after a few weeks of keeping my nose clean, I forgot about my promise to God and began writing skulls in the book once more.
But I never used a cactus as a form of punishment EVER again!

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So there I was, a young man.

A weaselly little sprog of ten years, with a head full of Elves, witches, and goblins.

I was off to boarding school- as a punishment for being a useless little silver-tongued bastard, who apparently had no discipline and could not see a task through to completion. (Overheard my mother telling a friend on the phone.)

My mother was sending me off to learn manners, discipline, and the gritty value of hard work… or now that I’m a man grown and think on it… could have been just the fact that she had the money… it seemed like a vaguely good idea and took care of the problem of taking care of me, so she could take off overseas.

If she had known it would only teach me stealth, deception, the intricacies of blackmail, and deep and encysted feelings of hatred, she may have spent the 30 grand on a new car instead.

When people ask me what it was like at boarding school at 10 years old, I say
”If you can imagine Harry Potter… well, basically exactly like that but with no magic or monsters. And instead of magic and monsters, just arbitrary punishments and random beatings, to punctuate ungodly amounts of schoolwork.”

It took a little while for what small fuzzy child-like exterior I DID have, to be seared away, exposing a blackened core.

I will now detail the principal incidents of that searing.

I was in the dormitory on the very top floor of the school’s main ancient building. It was called Crows Nest and it housed 14 of us 10-year-old’s and one Prefect.

A Prefect was a 12-year-old who was in charge of us and could order us about and recommend detention if we misbehaved.

You had a tiny cubicle that housed your clothes, bunk bed, and a very small amount of possessions. You were allowed one poster or calendar. You were teamed up with another kid who they made sure had a completely incompatible personality to yours.

I did not have a bunk mate. And thus I was very lucky and was allowed to shiver, cold, and crying alone in the darkness with homesickness and hideous dread without anyone on the bunk above to hear my piteous whimpering.

After a while something inside me died and I couldn’t cry anymore. I had gone totally numb and I would fall asleep to the sounds of other little abandoned ten year old’s crying silently, alone in the darkness. This was soothing and made me feel good. Like I was a brave warrior like in the fantasy books I fanatically read to escape reality.

Our lives were a regimented system, only slightly harsher than a prison camp. The lights were blasted on at 6: 30 am accompanied by the shout “UP AND SHOWERS BOYS”. Then you had to frozenly rush down four flights of stairs to the showers, which were in a large concrete basement.

It was always damp, cold, and smelt like piss and naked shamefaced embarrassment.

A Tutor, (Tutors -The Tutors were young men in their 20s who were given free room and board in exchange for a few shifts of giving us brats detentions, tormenting the fuck out of us, and generally making sure we didn’t kill each other or destroying school property ) or a Matron, (The Matrons came and went, they were “nurses” who were in charge of our health and ranged from kindly powder-smelling old fat women to young motorbike riding long legged and redheaded vixen nurses who smelt sweaty and the older kids talked about in a gross way. For some strange reason, I had to get naked in front of these gals, and have my balls felt by them (for health reasons ) - supervised the showers and you stood chilled and shivering in line until ushered into the gray-tiled concrete bunker with 15 shower heads attached to the ceiling. There you and 14 other boys would stand in a weak spray of water which was only slightly warmer than the frozen dungeon this ordeal took place in.

I found out in year two that the reason the showers were cold was that the prefects were allowed to get up early and have their showers first.
They made sure they used up ALL the hot water, which was just awesome.

You got one minute and then you were off to “dry” yourself with your damp and pissy-smelling towel.

After about three months of this, I started getting harsh redness and itchiness on the sides of my feet and legs – in my teen years my medical knowledge increased and I correctly diagnosed this ailment in my memory as chilblains. By then I was not suffering from such ailments as I had stopped living like a poor orphan from the streets of Victorian London and the knowledge was of no use to me.

After showers, we would flee back to our rooms to dress in the scratchy wool short shorts and a gray cotton shirt that was our perpetual clothing. Long-legged pants were not allowed. Thus clothed we would shiver and shake down to the dining room. Even on the hottest of summer days the hallways and cloisters had a chill to them that was never refreshing. I guess it was because it was New Zealand where outside of one mild summer month, the temperature ranges from tolerably brisk to freezing and miserable.

Once in the dining hall (which we called The Barn) we would get our breakfast. Usually a large dollop of grey porridge. It tasted pretty rough, but if you mixed enough sugar with it you could gag it down with a cup of tea.

Then it was off to school. Just a short walk along another freezing cloister.

What can I say – this was most probably the best school in New Zealand.

All the best teaching equipment, we learned poetry and grammar, we studied a lot of world history, made small chests of drawers in the wood shop, and did pottery. Each night after dinner we did an hour of homework back in the classrooms. In all, we got about nine hours of schooling a day and were made to play sports after school which combined with the harsh gym classes turned us each into intelligent little machines that could run, jump and kick a ball.

While the rest of New Zealand ten year old’s were crammed into classrooms of 50 and reduced to screaming imbecility through the making of potato cut-out prints and eating paste, we were learning by rote poetry such as the anthem of the American Revolution – Paul Revere’s Ride; instilling within me a red hot hatred for the British, and a deep and probably unhealthy identification with the early American patriots.

You know the rest. In the books you have read, How the British Regulars fired and fled, How the farmers gave them ball for ball, From behind each fence and farmyard wall, Chasing the Redcoats down the lane, Then crossing the fields to emerge again. Under the trees at the turn of the road, And only pausing to fire and load….

That’s from the poem Paul Revere’s Ride… in case your education skipped early American poetry.

What deep hatred for the Redcoats that was growing within me was magnified and frenzied by another poem we had to learn by rote a few weeks later- this was called The Highwayman.(1906 - Alfred Noyes)…I always felt that I was a bit of a Highwayman and I identified unhealthily with the Highwayman in the poem.

When the bastard Redcoats capture his woman (the Landlord’s daughter) and she kills herself I start looking for my silver pistols and when they shoot me down on the highway, down like a dog on the highway and I lie in my blood on the highway with a bunch of lace at my throat, I start firing and don’t stop until I have turned the head of every Redcoat into a canoe. In my ten year old daydreams…

So yes… 10 years old … in class imagining I’m shooting British infantrymen in the head… If I had just had Minecraft when I was 10 instead, I might have turned out ok…

Reading the poem would reduce me to tears and little clenched fists of fury and I would be too emotional to continue and so would just stand at the front of the class with my head down unable to utter another stanza.

I would be allowed to go outside to “calmly gather yourself”. I was not asked to read that particular poem in front of the class again.

But I still know it all by heart. And here’s a bit.

A red-coat troop came marching- Marching-marching-
King George’s men came marching, up to the old inn-door.
They said no word to the landlord, they drank his ale instead,
But they gagged his daughter and bound her to the foot of her narrow bed;
Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side!
There was death at every window; And hell at one dark window.
Back, I spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind me and my rapier brandished high!
Blood-red were my spurs in the golden noon; wine-red was my velvet coat,
When they shot me down on the highway, Down like a dog on the highway, And I lay in my blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at my throat.

Lacking any silver-butted pistols, smooth-bore flintlock musket of a large caliber, or Red coats to shoot I had to be content with making a tiny blow gun and needles from the poisonous spines of a cactus that grew next to the gym, and secretly shooting homemade darts into the other kids. But that is another story.

Anyway, it is not the purpose of this tale to talk about the emotional content of the history lessons I received or my bitter hatred of all things under King George’s failing British Empire, nor the mundane meanderings of eating, showering, or sleeping.
The purpose is to amuse the reader with the crazy things that happened at boarding school when I was young.

And now I will begin.

Days at boarding school were spent trying to avoid being beaten by larger kids, or to avoid getting caught and then beaten by the Housemaster for beating younger kids.

The Housemaster was the big boss. The twisted old disciplinarian that ran our section of he school. Basically exactly like Hagrid from Harry Potter, but instead of helping kids and being kind, he relished in beating kids and inflicting degrading and brutal punishments….

It was a shit rolls downhill, passing on the hate bullying system that now you only hear about in legend.

I am a bard of such legends.

Do not think for a moment that the threat and actual eventuating of vicious beatings deterred me from doing weird and naughty things.

Hell no.

It just made it all the more exciting and it made me much more covert and cunning.

My first introduction to the real importance of not advertising one’s insanity was only two weeks into my stay.

It was Saturday night and the whole school of boys aged 10-12 were allowed to sprawl on cushions and watch some G-rated movie on the small TV in the common room. You were also allowed to use two dollars of your allowance to purchase a small amount of candy which had to be eaten by the time the movie was over. If you were caught with any candy when it wasn’t Saturday night you were beaten.

I had been naughty, but not naughty enough to warrant a beating (I was still warming up). I had purposely stood on the vacuum cleaner cord as another kid vacuumed the common room, causing it to pop out. So I had to sit outside the House master’s office and read a book with other bad kids, instead of watching the movie and eating treats.

The whole dorm of the 11 year old kids had been banned from the movie, for some infraction… I did not know what, but they were allowed to stay up in their dorm as there were too many of them to crowd around the office.

I saw a few kids come down from the dorm and then go into the Housemasters’ office. Then they went back to the dorm, running with excitement! Then the entire dorm but for the two kids came down and lined up outside the door looking kinda sick and fearful.

What had happened was, a few kids in the dorm had somehow snuck some candy and they shared this with the others. Two kids didn’t get any so they told on the rest. Now all those kids who ate the candy were getting a caning.

Life can’t get fairer.

They would go into the office and close the door behind them and then there would be a loud and sharp smacking sound and the kid would come bolting out – red-faced and staunchly go straight to the bathrooms to cry tears of deeply alone hopelessness.

I had to find out more. So I LISTENED at the door! I heard the gruff voice say “ Stand on that spot and touch your toes”. Then I would hear the WHACK!!.

I would jump back to my seat and a teary kid would come out.

I managed to hear three before some kid told on me. I heard him telling on me and as he told, I detachedly realized I was listening at the door.

I felt weak and sick. I just staggered back and stood in the middle of the hallway staring at the door. The room took on a goldfish bowl effect and things became dreamlike and unreal. I felt like fainting and shitting myself at the same time.

The door opened and the kid looked and me and smiled a teary-eyed evil smile. Behind him was the stern housemaster.

“Come in here” he announced.

The room was in the classic New Zealand post-ww1 style, decorated in the 30s. Due to the thrift and economics of the place, it would of course remain unchanged until it was dust.

Floral patterned carpet, thick brown curtains. Leather-covered chairs and the smell of neglect and fear. He was entering my name into a ledger.

Name, amount, and reason for the punishment.

Under the reason section he wrote: Idiocy.

I stood on the spot I was told to (a large red flower in the carpet), touched my toes, and received THE WHACK.

I didn’t cry. I was too tough for that shit. I just went outside and sat down, getting a few impressed raised eyebrows from some of the other kids.

I started pondering how I better lift my game and become much more covert as an operating basis.

It was called THE WHACK.

Kids would say “ I just got THE WHACK” or “James got THE WHACK last night and cried for ages” or “I heard the whole class is going to get THE WHACK!!”.

It was so terrifying and encompassing that it was afforded full caps. When you said it you said it with respect.

When you said it you stopped what you were doing opened your eyes wide and said it slowly.

It was never laughed about unless you were taunting an enemy as in “Ha Ha you’re going to get THE WHHHAAAACCKK and it’s gonna hurt like a bastard and you’re gonna cry for mummy like a little baby!”.

We often would pretend that we knew that someone was going to get THE WHACK for something they had done, that they did not think the housemaster knew about. We would tease the person to the point of terror, convincing the guy that his crime had been reported, and soon the call would come. Once a guy got so scared and overwhelmed with dread that he went and handed himself into the housemaster, telling the housemaster that he was there to get THE WHACK for stealing a granola bar from another kid.

He got THE WHACK sure enough. To this day that poor bastard doesn’t know that we never told on him.

THE WHACK came in three forms. There was Sloppy Joe. He was a well-worn old slipper and was used for first-timers, small kids, or minor offenses, he was a friend you could trust, and he didn’t make you cry unless it was with relief or unless you were one of the frail weak children who were crying most of the time anyway.

There was Claudius. He was a large, old, and dangerous-looking Roman sandal. He had a lot of weight. He was an uncaring disciplinary menace that you couldn’t predict and it was he who was used the majority of the time. From his efforts, hard crying and sometimes little screams were assured unless you were really hardened. When he hit you it sounded like a pistol going off behind your head and he sometimes would knock you to the ground. He was experienced.

According to legend, he had been delivering THE WHACK since the school opened in 1936.

Then there was THE CANE.

THE CANE was so scary that just the mention of it could cause a kid to cry and shake. I know one kid who ran away because someone told him he was going to get THE CANE.

THE CANE was a brutal cane made of rattan and was used only for the worst of crimes.

I once saw the toughest kid in our part of the school crawling on his hands and knees along the hallway, white and ghost-faced, dribbling and gasping like something from a horror movie. He crawled along about 10 meters of the hallway into the bathroom where he spewed on the floor and then lay screaming, for about 2 minutes.

All because of “Six of THE BEST”.

THE BEST referred to the hardest most punishing hits that the touch cricket-obsessed Housemaster could deal.

Six blows of the cane was the maximum allowed by the New Zealand legal system.

Surviving six of the best put you into such a legendary status that it was almost worth it.

The Housemaster once told us that any kid caught wandering around after lights out would receive Six of THE BEST.

I’m pretty sure this way he could just go home and pound his fat cow of a wife, instead of sticking around to make sure no one got out of bed.

THE BEST was only delivered with THE CANE. The above kid had received six of THE BEST for mooning the Housemasters’ spoiled bitch daughter.

I could see why the housemaster delivered this only late at night or when the school was empty.

Everyone else was at the chapel for Sunday church while this happened and I was the only one who saw him in his sorry state.

He told me later that if I told anyone that I saw him crying after the cane, he would “Crush my balls like grapes”.

I received THE WHACK three times a term for my two-year indenture, for a total of 24 WHACKS in all.

The majority of my WHACKS were administered for hurting other kids.

I had to punish the guilty as I will detail later.

I had a friend who would wait outside the office when I was getting THE WHACK. He would taunt me with “Your gonna cry, your gonna cry - your crying I can see it! Your crying! “ When I wasn’t crying.
However, his taunting would kick the loneliness of being 10 and abandoned to an uncaring world, in on me, and more often than not I would head to the bathrooms to cool my hot burning ass cheek in the sink with the cold tap on full blast, then crawl into my locker and shut the door after me so I could be alone in a dark little misery hole.

Not crying but definitely mentally damaging myself by pushing the emotions down.

One day the time came for my taunting friend to get THE WHACK and I saw him looking around to make sure I didn’t see him going into the office to receive it. When he came out I was standing RIGHT THERE. With a big evil and satisfied smile on my face. He said “SHUT UP!” and burst into tears of loneliness and pain.

That made me feel good.

At some point, not long after getting THE WHACK for the first time, I bent my mind to activities of cunning and evil. Almost as if there is something to the theory that being beaten as a child is bad for your psyche… there might be something to that… but no matter…

One of the bad cunning and evil things I did was an act of such betrayal and trickery that I hold it as one of my greatest achievements.

I was up in Crows Nest with a friend called King (we were all referred to by our last names). No one else was about and King opened up the bottom drawer of a Prefects bunk. Revealing a huge bag of candy and packets of chips and bars of chocolate!

He said, “ Let’s take these!”.

I put forward that we take most of them but also take some down to the Housemaster saying we heard the Prefect eating them at night. That way one of our enemies would get THE WHACK and we would get treats AND the smug satisfaction of bringing doom to an oppressor. So we did that and the prefect got two of THE BEST, which made him lie on his bed, face in the pillow, for about an hour crying.

Then I made sure that King kept all candy the hidden in his drawer and I ate none.

The next day I went to Kings drawer and stole most of the treats and hid them in a hollowed-out section of my mattress where no one would find them. I then told the Prefect that King had stolen his treats and then told on him precipitating him getting THE WHACK.

I showed the Prefect where King had hidden the lollies. In a rage, he swiftly ate the small number of treats I had left in King’s drawer and then when King came up to the dorm he hit him in the head with a tennis racket. King tried to fight but the Prefect was stronger. King went flying back to the wall from a flurry of nasty punches to the chest, he then flipped him to the ground, then followed up with body slamming him with both knees to the back. When King could breathe again he started screaming so loudly a Tutor came in and took them both down to the housemaster.

Where they both got three Claudius WHACKS.

I hid under my bed eating the lollies while this happened.

That made me feel good.

Why did I just turn around and betray my good friend King?

I had even been to his house on the weekend and stayed over and played Operation! and we had rode bikes like happy kids, not a week before.
The simplest answers are usually the right ones.

Like any animal put into a cage and beaten I had gone fucking nuts.

I fell in with a couple of guys whose situation was the same as mine.

Sent to boarding school for becoming too tricky and evil, and once there, the beatings and abuse broke the last rungs off the sanity ladder.

We took being naughty to a new level. We only talked about our crimes with each other. We weren’t cruel to those who didn’t deserve it and we weren’t random in our mayhem. What we did was done for personal thrills or carefully calculated to punish the guilty.

Any den of rouges needs a hideout and we had one. Underneath one of the school buildings, there was a room. A small dank smelling concrete basement that had been walled up and forgotten. No one had been down there for decades when we found it. We entered through a tiny boarded-over window that was near the ground behind a small hedge.

We found this secret window when hiding behind the hedge one day.

We stashed candles in there and stole a cushion each from the common room to sit on.

I have no idea how many hours I spent in that dark hole whispering to my friends but we all took on the smell of the place after a while.

We would get dry grass from the mowed lawn. We would roll joints of this with small rectangles of paper we tore from a bible that we stole from the chapel.

We would blaze these down in our den. Sometimes we would blaze up to ten in an hour and emerge from our den reeking and red-eyed. Giddy from smoke inhalation, we would get rid of the smell by running across the field or we would time our blazing to before sports or swimming so we would be able to change. If told we smelled like smoke by a quizzical student we would say we had been playing by the incinerator, but we were pretty careful.

We would get the day students (they are kids who don’t board at the school) to buy us lollies and powdered drink mix. More often we didn’t have money so we would do school work for them. I would write stories for them or poetry which was sometimes required as homework. Working down in our den by stolen chapel candlelight. They could then copy my work into their book before school. This would be worth at least a big packet of drink mix or a good round lolly bag.

We wouldn’t eat the powdered drink mix or drink it. We would create lines of it on our books and snort it up our noses with a handmade, nicely decorated paper tube. This would give your brain a shock and after a while yummy lemon-lime-tasting snot would be running down the back of your throat.

One day we came to our hideout and the window had been closed off with a bolted on metal cover. The groundskeeper had locked us out.

My two friends now unable to find mental relief in smoking grass, and snorting lines of powdered drink mix, quickly moved on to more bizarre pursuits. namely creeping downstairs at night to the locker room and pissing in kid’s shoes and putting kid’s toothbrushes up each other’s asses.

I politely declined to take part in such nocturnal shenanigans, but not before taking my shoes and toothbrush upstairs with me to my cubicle.

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I was 7. It’s 1984. We had fled Canada, and my rich Grandfather had set my mother, my sister, and me up in a nice place in a flash Suburb of Auckland called Bucklands Beach.

The parents were divorced and out of control. Living their best boozy 80s single-parent lives, and so it was time for me to embrace my CODP (Child of Divorced Parents) essence and start really acting up.

The first naughty thing I did was start stealing White Chocolate Skulls filled with some kind of yummy weird red goo. These were called Skull Crushers. There was a store down the road from our house and I would go in there and chat to the store owner until he had to talk to a customer. When he was dealing with them, I would grab one Skull Crusher and pocket it.
I would say goodbye and then flee back home.

Back home I had a secret hidey hole.

It was a small cupboard in the wall of the lounge. I could almost sit up in it.
For some weird 70s reason, it was carpeted in thick green shag pile carpet. Into my Goth base I had brought a number of pumpkins, some scary toys (rubber spiders and snakes), and a red candle.

I would light the candle and sit in there, embracing the Goth essence of the pumpkins, red candle and spiders. I was Goth to the bones… and was later in life to be deeply mashed into this subculture.

I would then draw the stolen skull candy out of my pocket and nibble away at it till it was gone. Sucking down the yummy red, bloody, fake raspberry goo center.

The combination of the oxygen deprivation from the lit candle in the sealed space and the toxic chemicals in the coloring and flavorings of the bright red candy blood goo in the skull would send me to the fucking moon. Pupils like dinner plates man.

I would wait till I was, for lack of a better term, Off my Fucking Face Fucked Up, blow the candle out and stagger outside to Vibe man Vibe.

I now work in Natural Health, and I know exactly what was happening. I definitely had an extreme Red Dye Allergy. My hippy mother ensured I had a very healthy diet, devoid of sugar and toxins. This gunge hit me like a brick.

Symptoms Of Red Dye Allergy

• Faster pulse

• Significant drop in blood pressure

• Dizziness

• Fainting

• Lack of sleep

• Poor concentration

• Hyperactivity

• Hypersensitivity

• Hyperfocus

So to me it was Drugs for sure. I was hooked and stole one Skull a day for many days.

One day, my father suddenly turned up after a year of being absent… the last time I saw him was when I passed the Christmas Divorce Test over in Hawaii. He seemed wild and crazy. It was a shock to see him again after so long.

He had a cool low-slung truck and was in full party mode. For some reason, he came and picked myself and my sister up and drove us out to a farm where a bunch of his mates lived. He went inside to the kitchen to pound beers and blaze weed with his pals… my sister and I were left to roam free.

We roamed about the farm for a bit, and then we started hanging out inside, keeping to the lounge at the back of the house… soon I began sneaking into the bedrooms...

In some guys bedroom I saw it.

A jar by the bed full of money.

Many of us have the experience of stealing coins out of change jars I’m sure.

This jar was piled high with silver. My blooming criminal addict brain immediately presented me the task of getting that money, so I could by a shit ton of skull candies and fuck myself up good in my secret Goth Base.

I looked around for something to carry the money in, and spied a folded-up handkerchief.

Nabbing this, I loaded a good whack of the 50 Cent and 20 Cent coins into it and twisting it about, snuck out of the house.

My sister saw me sneaking with something bulging in my pocket and said: “What that?”

Me: “Its some money. I’m going to buy a present for mum with it.”

Her: “Don’t tell Dad!”

Suddenly, I heard a yell. That froze us to the core.

“DON’T TELL DAD WHAT”!!”

It was our Dad, and he had come out to take us home and I was snapped.

He saw the rolled up stolen money, and there was a shocked look as he realized I that I had become a “Bad Kid”. The type forged in the fires of inattentive divorced 80s parents.

He snuck the money back inside into the Jar…

And we rolled out.

I remember him ranting on about stealing being bad but I was just so mentally smashed from being caught at that point, and super sad for my little sister who was crying her eyes out in the back.

My Dad had the scary burnt leaves and beer smell fuming off him and was red eyed and ranting. Everything was spiraling down into a black abyss.

He stopped the truck at the gate at the end of the farm.

It was always my job to open the gates. Opening fucking gates were the bane of my life.

I opened the heavy metal door of the truck and ….

POW !!! Suddenly got such a shock I was blasted into near unconsciousness.

What the FUCK? I struggled back to life, head buzzing, heart pounding. Later I found I had even pissed myself a bit.

“THAT’S GOD PUNISHING YOU FOR STEALING!” Yelled my Dad.

Those words went into my brain like a Javelin.

I mentally snapped and went totally numb.

On opening the truck door I had touched the metal door, with its bare metal handle to a high powered electric fence.

I sat there fucked. God was punishing me. My sisters crying, Dads crazy.

Mums crazy and sad. Everything is shit.

The world was pretty black.

We were taken home and my father made me tell my mother what I had done.

I was numb, I didn’t care. He blamed her for being a shit mother, and that’s why we were spoiled shit kids. He took off and wasn’t seen again for ages.

I went to my room and drew pictures of ET flying away with me in a cardboard box, because I didn’t have a bike he could magic up in the air.

I stopped stealing, dismantled my Goth Base, and started doing much more wandering about in a confused daze of suppressed grief, being very careful not to touch things.

I did however, eventually come right. Come out of apathy, get mad at the world and start stealing and acting up again.

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A Grade A Bullshit Situation

In 1983, when I was 6, my sister and I were living with my wealthy logger uncle and his wife and four kids in Nanaimo, Canada. My mum had dropped us off to stay there as she was on the run from my dad and couldn’t hide very well with us slowing her down.

This was a “Grade A Bullshit situation,” according to my aunt, and she and her demented four spoiled brats tormented the fuck out of us.

But the best torment came when they got to go to McDonald’s every Saturday and get anything they wanted.

On the first trip, I mistakenly said I wanted a Big Mac and a Hot Cherry Pie!

All the brats turned on me and explained that me and my sister would only be getting a hamburger (not even a cheeseburger) because we were poor and our mum was “Who the fuck knows where!” They had obviously heard their mum say this line… as it was an oft-repeated favorite of theirs.

And so it was we got a dry-as-fuck hamburger each time. I would try to enjoy it as my evil aunt would chain-blaze smokes and glare at me from under her scary brown mop of a perm.

Fast forward 40 years and I’m writing this in my beautiful house where I live with my beautiful kids and wife, doing quite well… loved by my friends… feared and respected by my enemies…

I could probably buy a McDonald’s franchise if I wanted…

And the cousins… jail… alcoholism… heavily medicated with psych drugs… welfare… 7 kids to five different dudes… fat… sick…

So you know what… I just want to say thanks!

Because without people like them trying to smash me down, I never would have fought so hard to survive and win life. Bring on the beatings!

A word from my hero Al Swearengen:

“Every fuckin’ beating I’m grateful for. Every single fucking one of them. Get all the trust beat outta you. And you know what the fuckin’ world is.”

PASSING THE CHRISTMAS DIVORCE TEST

I was my own Dads Wingman

As I write this, on my wall to the right of me is a picture my son drew for me at school. A picture of him happy and smiling with a belly full of pizza and a heart full of love for his caring parents.

Stable at 6… secure, happy. He’s never seen his father hit his mother or raise his voice, or disappear for weeks on end to do the traditional 70s bad dad, booze, coke, and hookers thing.

I was reminiscing about something that happened to me on Christmas Day, 1983. I was thinking about how smart I must have been as a young child.

I think the insanity of my childhood environment made me super wise and cunning, as I have detailed in other stories…

Sadly, this wisdom and cunning seem to have tapered off over the years as I was engulfed by middle-class Mercia softness in my thirties… losing the battle to comfortable clothes around 2007…

So I write this bloated with Christmas snacks, in sweatpants, in my office with my double screens and my kids’ pictures on the wall… as the rest of my happy family sit on the couch watching some happy Christmas movie on the giant TV in the happy lounge of the happy house in comfortable Mercia Suburbia.

I couldn’t do that. I just can’t. I did my best. I did the present opening and the happiness and the saying nice things, but then the essence of it drove me in here to write this… to dig up something dark…

The soil of the Gen X man’s heart is stony… but he grows what he can and he tends it…

So I was six and my parents were fully split.

My sister was four, and she had gone from Canada to New Zealand with my mother. I was going onward to there as well, but with my father. This was so he could break the news to me on the way…

We were going through Hawaii. A full day stopover.

A perfect place to drop the divorce bomb.

It was weird being with my Dad. For the first time in my life that I could remember, he seemed focused on me and really happy.

Coming from winter in Canada, Hawaii was very real, bright, and hot. We went to Waikiki Beach and bought bathing trunks right in the store. This blew my mind. The air and sand were hot, and the water was bath-warm. That blew my mind too!

I had lived in Canada my whole life. I had not really experienced much “hot.”

He put me up on his shoulders and fell into the water. He threw me in the air and I landed in the sparkling warm water, gleefully laughing.

This was amazing and such connection and fun. This I had never experienced with my mostly absent father. I felt a little bit of hope and healing.

But it was a build-up to a trick…

He suddenly turned to six-year-old me in the water… looking serious… my 29-year-old dad… it’s 1983, he’s tanned, strong, young, and muscled from years of logging old-growth 1,000-year-old redwoods out of northern B.C… has a cool Tom Selleck mustache, bless him…

“Mate… well… your mother and I still love each other, but we aren’t going to be together anymore. We are having what’s called a separation. Your sister is going to be living with your mother… but who do you want to live with…?”

I was so fast…

“You, Dad! I want to live with you!”

I was born cunning. I believe everyone has a magic power. Mine is cunning.

Later in life, every shaman and medicine man I met would tell me my spirit animal is the raven. Always only after less than 20 minutes of chatting to me… They must be talking to each other, these guys…

The raven signifies mystery and divination, trickery, stealth, and the attraction to the magical or mystical ways.

When I was 5, I was at a kid’s birthday party. We were all playing baseball, and his mum had set up the food and the cake on the park picnic table. We were happily playing when I heard screaming from the picnic area. I looked back and saw a flock of about 20 sneaky ravens absolutely DESTROYING the cake. Like, standing in it, flapping and squawking and pecking up huge mouthfuls. White icing flying up all over them, going nuts.

I burst into laughter. The birthday kid burst into tears.

I bonded with ravens. I was going to be like them. I was going to sneak about in life and suddenly eat up people’s cakes. This was the prophecy of my spirit animal. I knew the raven’s ways as if born to them…

I digress…

“You, Dad! I want to live with you!”

He smiled, looking happy but also a tiny bit sad.

“I know, mate, but… you can’t… I don’t think it would work. I have to go and work at the logging camp and it’s no place for kids.” (Whiskey – hookers – coke…)

I made myself sadder…

“Dad, I would be good. I would hang out at the camp and watch TV, and we could be together.”

“Oh… well, I know you want to, but I think it’s really best if you live with your mother for now, but I will see you soon.” (two years)

“OK, Dad.” Cue slumped shoulders…

I had passed the test.

Like fuck I wanted to live with my hard-partying dad who just wanted to be free! I didn’t want to cock-block my old man. We would both hate that. I wanted to be with my mum who was on her way to being hooked up with a new life by her millionaire father, in single-mum, urban-mansion, fine-wine resting time.

And so it was that I swam and laughed with my dad on that wonderful Christmas Day in ’83 at Waikiki Beach, and life went on. We went our separate ways and all was well. He thought his boy wanted to be with him and got to go off feeling good. This is a secret I have never told until now, and like every wack life experience of mine, is now a story to entertain you.

If you want to send me money as well as buy my book here:

buymeacoffee.com/obsidianblackbird

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This is me at 6 or 7. Bowlcutmaxxing. I wanted to be Eliot, the kid from ET. ET would help me escape my shit life and find food. I didn’t have a bike he could make fly… but I imagined he could make a big cardboard box fly about with us in it. I kept one in my room with a pillow and a blanket in it, it my wardrobe ready for us…in case he rocked up, so we could take off at a moments notice.

As a child, I had slanty eyes. That’s some good old-fashioned Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Many 80s kids had these slanty eyes and elf-like features. I found this feature hot in girls as I grew up. Later in life, I noticed that the more redneck the girl’s parents, the more elf-like she was going to look. Girls from regular or rich families had round faces and round eyes. I never put it together until I read a medical book on child development with pages and pages of pictures of us elf kids.

I love writing sad stories about my abandoned Gen X 80s childhood, and you like reading them, probably because we are fucked in the head from that childhood.

In all my childhood, the most common feeling I remember was hunger.

My mum was always on the run, and we were moving from place to place, hiding from my dad, in a classic 80s spousal abuse kids-packed-into-the-car-and-driven-off thing.

No one wanted to really help us or get in on our business, because it was the 80s and clumsy women walked into doors all the time back then. The most my mother did to reach out for help was to pound wine with other bashed single mums and join them in shrill, tearful rants while us kids were sent outside in bare feet to smash bottles in alleyways.

So… this story is about three amazing moments that I lie back and remember to this day. These memory moments from my childhood gave me such feelings of pleasure and happiness that I feel their glowing warmth right now.

THE CINNAMON RED HOTS.

I was 6, it was 1983 and I was with my Dad. Before my mum fled, there were a few times I somehow wound up with him driving about Vancouver in his blue GMC pickup. I do remember him having to go to a courthouse. “Your insane mother is divorcing me,” he said before leaving me in the truck for an hour. I spent a lot of time sitting in that truck.

Anyway, one time we went into a mall. And he let me go in! I was never allowed to touch anything or go into any of the stores with him. Probably because I liked to touch things in the stores.

He made me stand outside this supermarket when he went in. I was not to move from that exact spot! I remember it all so perfectly. I stood there quietly, ignored by other mall people.

Next to me was one of those candy machine things that you put a coin into and turn a metal dial and candy comes out a chute.

I was never, ever allowed any. I had asked and been yelled at so many times for asking that I now looked upon these machines with a terrified reverence.

I checked the candy chute slots… praying… nothing… of course… there never is… I smelled my fingers. Wow… candy. I lived in a candy-less void. Candy cost money. “We have no money, because of your father.”

I heard my mother say this every six minutes. Dad had the money, but I guess that had to be spent on beers and gas and going to parties, because that’s all I saw him do...

I turned away dejected… but then… spied a tiny silver disc… some yards away…

My super powerful super-squint elf eyes spotted the Canadian dime.

I rushed over and grabbed it. The surge of happiness I felt blew fuses in my brain.

My heart pounded and the mall took on a sparkling, Christmassy look and feeling.

The machine candies were 10 cents!! I ran over and with shaking hands carefully put that 10-cent piece in. I cranked the handle ever so slowly to maximize the candy output, rocking the machine with my other hand as I had seen some big kids do once.

A bounty of Red Hots poured out. A pile of small, round cinnamon candy.

Ingredients:

• Corn syrup

• Natural and artificial flavors

• Acacia (Gum Arabic)

• Confectioner’s Glaze

• Carnauba wax

• Corn starch

• White mineral oil

• Red 40

You gotta get that white mineral oil in ya! And Red 40 for your tweaking.

I loaded them all into my pocket and put one in my mouth. I started freaking out.

If I was caught with these, it would be bad.

I came up with a plan. By carefully only eating one at a time and stashing it up between gum and cheek, it would happily burn away there, providing me with the triple whammy of corn syrup, white mineral oil and Red 40 till it was totally absorbed. No one would know. I was in a state of total bliss.

My sugar-starved kiddie brain was just baking in those toxins.

My Dad came out of the store and I followed behind him to the truck. We rolled out onto the mean streets and highways of Vancouver, 1983…

Soon he started sniffing the air. “What’s that sweet smell?” “Dunno Dad.” Cue confused face. “I don’t smell anything.” He continued smelling the air and barking questions about the smell...

I continued my confused pantomime gaslight until he was sure he was going insane. He settled on the fact that it must be a factory baking cakes. At that point, I agreed that I did smell it.

I secretly ate every single one of those red hots over a period of days.

And to this day, cinnamon tastes like victory to me.

THE RING POP.

I’m 6, I was somehow at a high school baseball game, in Nanaimo, Canada. Wandering alone about the place. Always on the lookout for dropped money or food.

I found a baseball on the ground! My candy-dreaming brain instantly came up with a plan to trade it for candy at the concession stand. I ran to the food, candy, hotdog, and coke-selling concession booth.

“Hi! I found this baseball! Can I swap it for some candy?”

The teenage girl stared down at my hopeful face and said, “Um, ok… you can have a Hot Lips or a Ring Pop.” Now, I knew all the candies. I had spent hours in stores studying them on their racks. I had spent many years watching my rich cousins consume them, while I piteously begged for scraps… even, to my shame, grabbing and chewing secondhand gum they had thrown to the pavement a few times.

Hot Lips were gummy cinnamon lips. Fucking weird… but cinnamon. Cinnamon was victory… but... the legendary Ring Pop, both fashion accessory and candy, was the right choice.

“Ring Pop!”

I got my Ring Pop and put it on. WOW! FUCKING GRAPE! OH MY GOD. I hid under the grandstand and sucked it nonstop. Heaven. Bliss. I cruised about with it… sucking on it till I almost pulled my teeth in. I still only got halfway through. I found the uncle and his kids who had taken me to this game, and I hid the Ring Pop in the foil packet and stashed it in my pocket.

I finished it up over the next few days, anytime I was alone.

On the toilet, backing out tiny hungry kid poops. In the bath. Sneaking out of the house, and anytime in bed once the lights were out. I kept the ring and the packet, which I licked clean and continued to sniff until all traces of the grape particles were gone. To this day, that fake grape tastes like victory to me.

THE CRACKERJACKS.

Same time period. I’m 6 or so and with my mum in our beat-up old car. We are in Nanaimo, B.C. Mum has to go into a bakery for some reason… to get a cake for someone, I think.

It’s hot, so it must have been summer. I have to stay in the car. But I want to go into the bakery to see the cakes and donuts. I beg and beg. NO! I have to stay in the car. I realize now this is because I was a fucking maniac. I would talk to everyone. I would touch everything. I would ask millions of questions.

Once at 5, at a restaurant when my parents weren’t looking, I wandered off and made friends with another family. I convinced them to order me a kid’s pizza. I was eating fries off their plates and chatting to them when I was finally found. The pizza was delivered to our table and I ate it happily while being yelled at for annoying those poor people. I would go on to annoy many poor people throughout my life.

Pulling this sort of shit is why I had to stay in the hot 80s car and cook like a roast goose.

So I’m in this boiling car, looking out at the cakes and treats in the bakery window. Vacillating between misery, numbness, and hunger.Suddenly, my mum comes out with something in her hands. She opens the door and gives me a box of Crackerjacks. “The ladies in the shop bought you this.”

WOW. I stared at the box, stupefied . I had had one Jack of the Cracker once before. A girl at my school had dropped one. I remembered the taste as if it were yesterday.

Now a whole box WITH A PRIZE INSIDE!!!

I carefully tore it open. The caramel popcorny smell hit me. I could feel the sweet sugary goodness all the way to the back of my brainstem. I dug in for the prize. It was a green plastic whistle. I whistled the shit out of that whistle. I had it for years.

I was so hungry I ate everything in one go as fast as I could, but I chewed everything really well. Then I sat in the car happy, blowing the whistle. When my mother got in the car, I kept blowing the whistle. I was warned that the whistle would be going right out the window if I blew it one more time.

To this day, caramel corn tastes like victory to me.

If you want to send me money as well as buy my book here :)

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So there I was…, a young man…

I was six, and I think for some reason we were on the run from my Dad… or … Dad didn’t know where we were living right now… or he was away for a long time working… or some such early 80s    packed-the-kids-into-the-car-and-driven-off-suddenly-in-the-night-with-the-kids type of explanation.

It was an interesting limbo time for me and my sister…

It seemed that my Mum would haul us about to a series of single mothers’ dens throughout Vancouver.

These big-haired women always seemed to be chain-blazing smokes, with a glass of red wine in hand and harping on about some no-good man, while us kids were shuttled outside to play—unsupervised—as the mothers ranted and cackled.

By us kids, I mean the forlorn, fed-on-peanut-butter-and-white-bread spazes that were left in a sort of confused and numb suppressed grief over the “Where’s Daddy?” and “Why is he such a bad man?” quandary.

I remember so many trailers, so many hours hanging with weird, sad, and angry kids whose main pastime was smashing bottles with rocks…

So many hours spent staring at sea monkeys… and so many kids’ rooms that were tiny, messy, pissy-smelling hovels in these thin single-wide trailers…

That was my world…

I started recognizing that the trailer moms and kids were way worse off than the apartment kids.

That’s hitting bottom. And I kind of knew it even back then.

One particular kid on one particular day sticks out in my memory.

I will never forget it. The stink of that day is in my bones.

He was my first best friend. Why my mother thought it was ok for her six-year-old to be taken care of by a nine-year-old retarded kid I will never know.

But that day changed me—my essence—profoundly.

I have no idea what this kid’s name was, but he was a retard. Not so retarded that he would just shit himself and drool—but still a retard. It was like he had no filters that made other normal kids scared or worried about getting into danger or trouble. He could talk and run about and had things going on in his life—he was by no means handicapped by his retardation.

He was quite stocky and had black hair in a crude bowl cut.

I had no idea there was anything wrong with this kid, until about a decade later.

I thought he was a cool kid and had THE FIRE!

Now remember, this is the early 80s—if you were a retard, you were a straight-up retard. You weren’t “Special” or “mentally challenged” or whatever the fuck autistic is. You were a fucking Mong.

There was no recourse to people who gave a fuck about your plight. You just had to harden up and become as cunning as a bastard to get by.

As soon as I was placed in Tard Boy’s care, he took me to his room, and from under his mattress he produced box after box of big chocolate-covered almonds, which we fed on until almost sick.

Then in a chocolaty daze, we went outside to the parking lot of the apartment, where he introduced me to an amazing game that he had invented.

It was called “Catch the Onion.”

He had procured a sack of very large onions from somewhere, and I was provided with a plastic crate. The type that holds a number of milk bottles. It has a grid-like pattern of holders for the bottles.

Anyway, the game consisted of throwing the large onion as high as possible in the air for the other guy to catch in the crate.

The trick was that as you caught this onion, or as it hit the ground, it began to fragment, and successive catches sprayed acrid onion juice into your face, making it progressively harder to catch and the game progressively harder to play.

Now remember, this is the 80s, and the onions back then were at least twice as acrid as today.

Tard Boy’s slitted Mongoloid eyes gave him an unfair advantage in resisting the burning oniony spray, and I collapsed first, gasping and unable to see or breathe properly. He fed me more chocolate almonds, from his pocket to heal me up, and led me by the arm, blind and staggering down the road to a bowling alley.

The next thing I know, the lady behind the counter at the bowling alley is yelling at Tard Boy. She’s yelling, “Where’s the 14 dollars? You haven’t been eating the almonds, have you?!! You have to sell them to raise money for your brother’s hockey trip, you stupid little shit!!!”

He screamed his innocence.

I had no idea if she could see the chocolate on our faces. Perhaps the onion spray had washed it off, I don’t know. But we hightailed it out of there and back to the parking lot for another game of his design, on dusk. The perfect time for his next game.

This one was called “FIRE BIN.”

From the side of the apartment block, he produced a long piece of bamboo, perhaps six meters in length. A plastic garbage bin was upended, emptied of its stinking trash, and placed on the end of the pole so it could be hoisted into the air—though not before Tard Boy, in his infinite innovation, lit the edge with a big lighter. The bin started to ignite, and as it burned he lifted it skyward on the pole, to flare prettily in the evening. It dripped super-heated molten plastic, and by flicking the pole just right, he could splatter this flaming plastic onto the parked cars or the lawn or the pavement, or the side of the apartment building. I followed him, screaming in terrified glee until the entire bin was aflame and started to SLIDE DOWN THE POLE. Quick as a flash, Tard Boy flung the entire flaming apparatus into the apartment complex’s pool, where it bobbed, still burning for a bit, on the surface.

All this rampaging had made us hungry, so we headed inside to demand food from our mothers. Seeing the chocolate, onion, and soot-spattered state of us, we were put into a hot bath.

While in there, Tard Boy introduced me to his masterwork.

The crowning achievement of all his moronic games. An affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified that it amounted to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation.

This game went Full Retard.

He called it “POTIONS.”

And it was as brilliant as it was simple.

It consisted of emptying everything in the bathroom into the bath, starting with the closest containers and widening out in an expanding sphere until everything was in the bath with us. And every container had to be double-rinsed to make sure we got it all.

We, of course, started by squeezing the soaps to mush, including his mum’s special soaps and bath gels. Then all of the shampoos and conditioners. Then the toothpaste and mouthwash. Then we sprayed out all the 80s hair mousse into a huge foamy pile. Then two packets of scented bath salts went in.

All of his brother’s hair gel and shaving cream followed. All of his mum’s facial products including lipsticks. Squeezing each lipstick into a mush before dropping it into the POTION.

At this point, I kind of figured that we were probably being naughty. But he didn’t seem scared or worried. He seemed really happy. So I thought it must be ok…

Then in went all his mum’s makeup, eyeliners, about ten bottles of nail polish plus nail polish remover, the eyelash stick weird thing with the black goo, and the makeup bag for good measure.

That was everything we could reach, so we played in that soup for a bit, till he realized there was more stuff under the sink, so in went rolls and rolls of toilet paper, toilet cleaner, a thing of bathroom cleaning powder, and a bottle of bleach.

Stirred and stirred and stirred with the pooey toilet brush.

I started to get a bad feeling. I was sitting in a bath up to my chest of a thick, multi-colored goop. The smell started to hurt my eyes.

We tried to play in the goop, but we couldn’t stop coughing, and the burning of the eyes was making catching the sodden toilet rolls difficult, and the spray stung your eyes way worse than the onion.

The next thing I remember is feeling like my ass and little doodle was on fire, and soon we were both screaming.I can remember his mum coming in and screaming something at us and turning the shower on and pulling us out of the caustic soup. She tried to pull the plug of the bath, but the goop was too thick with makeup and toilet paper to go down. I think she felt helpless, so she just furiously spanked the shit out of him, which was probably her answer to anything he did.

I was washed off and dressed and we rolled out… I never saw him again. But I do still fondly remember Tard Boy, and one day plan to introduce my son to his game of Catch the Onion, which we will play in his honor. 

( Now looking back - he was actually a high functioning down-syndrome boy- not mentally retarded.)

If you like the story and want to support me, subscribe, restack and share and buy my book! 500 pages of Gen X storytime goodness.

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Links to buy my book at the end of the story :) Much appreciated.

So there I was, a young man...

I was six and we were on the run from my Dad...

A trifecta of bad things had hit our family unit, which was composed of my Mother, myself, and my 4-year-old sister...

I was being taken care of by my mother’s friends, Jan, and his wife for a weekend. They were nice enough...

I was on an island off the coast of British Columbia while my mother and sister were on the island of Vancouver, in a town called Nanaimo.

It was a horrendous snowy winter.

An 80s Canada, it was a “homeless people frozen dead on the sidewalks while uncaring rich 80s stock-market fat-cats stepped over the bodies, sort of winter…”

My sister was in the car of our babysitter, Noni—A large, older woman with big hair and a high squeaky voice... Her little dog, Tippy, jumped up and got in the way of the driving...

The car crashed…

My 4-year-old sister is now in hospital with a broken leg. We have no money... And my mum has to somehow work her minimum-wage hairdressing job at “Fantastic Sam’s,” in the town of Nanaimo, between running to the hospital every day while staying at a friend’s house.

The ferries also started a weeks-long strike that day as part of Operation Solidarity—a huge British Columbia worker’s strike in 1983.

In short, I was now trapped on an island with Jan and his family.

I was stuck there for about two weeks... which of course is the equivalent of nine years in the mind of a six-year-old.

I recall Jan explaining that my sister had been in a crash and had a broken leg, and that I would be staying with them for a bit longer, because the ferries were on strike, and so Mum couldn’t get back.

No problem! They ate three real meals, had a warm house and a big TV. Something that my family, at that time, didn’t have any of...Remember this was 80s TV too—Quality.

I was in the daughter’s room, on a mattress on the floor. She had a record player and I was hooked on the first three songs on one of the records she had— “HIT WAVE 82.”

Check out this track list!:

In the first 24 hours of Jan being called up by my mother and him happily telling her that taking care of me was no problem at all, I experienced the following awesome shocks:

The next morning, I went to my school on the school bus with the daughter... all seemed fine... but really, dark clouds were gathering...

In class, everyone was told to get out their crayons and glue for our art project. All the other parents had supplied their kids with crayons and glue, as instructed by the newsletter we brought home.

Out came the tower-shaped, turntable Crayola Caddies... (look those beauties up if you don’t know what they are—boxes of super nice crayons with built-in sharpeners in the base and the silver, gold and bronze crayons), and out came the nice, white, sweet smelling glue in clean, white bottles with easily dispensing nozzles.

I got my crayons and glue out... but within a minute...

I heard, “Pooooo! What’s that stinky smell!”

“OH gross! It’s HIS glue.”

I looked at my glue...

My glue was in a weird gunky snotty glass pot... with the lid on crooked... and a weird old wild bristly brush jammed down into a mostly-dried, stinking, gray mass. It was most likely made up of mashed-up, rotten horse testicles.

The teacher came over... and looked at my glue... then picked up my crayons.

My crayons were not the special Crayola ones... my crayons were the four-pack from that greasy Italian restaurant our uncle took us and our mum out to... where mum started crying and talking about Dad taking off... and we had to go sit in the car...

Tiny red, blue, yellow, and green paper-wrapped sticks that drew about as good as a lightly-colored candle.

Gently putting down my crayons and looking at me with sad, kind eyes, she picked up my glue pot and said, “I’m just going to put this outside for now ok? And, you can take it home with you later. I have some other spare glue you can use.”

I said nothing... but I observed the other kids laughing as they watched her take my glue outside the class.

I looked at my crayons... I looked at the other kids’ crayons... I looked at their glue... I looked at their awesome 80s backpacks over on the wall... I looked at my weird, old-woman’s 70s vinyl handbag... that I had for a backpack...

I had a shattering moment of clarity... We were as poor as fuck.

It sort of all lined up suddenly... the weird meals, the fact the other kid’s rooms were always filled with toys, while I had only a few toys in a paper bag—wack toys that were mostly from Cracker Jack boxes or happy meals.

Our car broke down a lot and was shitty and we moved around a lot and kind of always lived in weird places... or with “Aunt someone” or “Uncle someone else”.

It sank in, and I started to feel a small but painful and growing sting of unfairness...

So, I get off the bus back to Jan’s big flash house and, stepping off the bus into the knee-deep snow, there is giant, bearded Jan... looking stern, and kind of angry.

He sent his kid inside and bade me go with him over to his workshop where, among the sawdust and oil smells, he crouched down to face me with his freaky skinny but big, bearded face and beery breath...

He told me that I had gone into his shed and broken many of his expensive tools, and that I would have to work off the damage every day after school now.

I just stared at him at first. This was the first time in my life an adult had suddenly become an evil liar. It was hard to take in...

I protested that I had never been into his shed and had broken none of his expensive tools.

He looked gleefully angry, in a fake way, and insisted that I had indeed broken his expensive tools and that the only way to pay for them was for me to do jobs after school, as my mum had no money and would not be able to buy him new ones.

The glue. He must somehow have known about the stinky glue.

It was a setup.

I believe, even though I was only six, my mind worked very well.

I was intelligent, but of course not wise in the ways of the world... yet.

I resigned myself to my fate... and just said “OK.”

Not the first time, or the last, that I would agree to some sort of bullshit in order to survive.

So every day after school I would work until dark. He had a truck full of chopped wood and I was to climb up on the truck bed, throw a piece of wood off and roll it through the snow over to the wood stack against the wall, and stack it all up.

Every day for about two weeks, as soon as one load was complete, the next day there would be another.

After I finished the first truckload, he said “You’re working so well, if you keep this up I’ll have to give you a raise,” and laughed heartily and meanly.

I didn’t even know what he meant. But as I looked at him, a new concept formed.

Hurt Bad Man Jan.

How could I hurt Bad Man Jan?

Jan was big and strong, and my mum was gone.

But at a precise moment, while rolling a log through snow with frozen, numb, little six-year-old hands, I decided I was going to get big and strong—and one day, find Bad Man Jan and hurt him real bad.

Then, I just pushed that thought away and kept rolling and stacking the wood.

There were other injustices I added to the list of painful paybacks that would be coming Bad Man Jan’s way, one day.

He spanked the shit out of his daughter one day for knocking over a bunch of beer bottles that were in the hall.

Due to the fact that I had started to hate her, and because she got to go inside and watch ELECTRIC COMPANY and other cool shows and eat food after school, she had started to hate me too.

I’d see her watching me through the window as I worked in the snow, her eyes sad. I’d stare back, and then she’d turn back to the TV, the snacks, and the warm fire.

She had Survivor guilt.

Also, I’m sure her dad told her that I broke all his expensive tools...

But any time she was bad, she was spanked till she was screaming like her arms were being ripped off.

The early 80s over the knee, POW POW POW full adult-anger, bare-arse hand spanks.

I laughed in glee and happiness. That’s how demented I had become.

“Think it’s funny do ya?!”

I was grabbed and spanked viciously.

I did not make a sound—I was too tough and numb for that.

His wife yelled “Jan! You will leave marks!” And he stopped.

When my mother would call every few days he would tell her I was very happy and doing great and we were all having a great time, then hand the phone to me and stand right over me to make sure I didn’t say anything bad.

When the family had dinner I had to get my own food from what was left in the kitchen, I wasn’t given a place at the table and had to eat in the lounge by myself.

I was not allowed any of the nice desserts they had.

But he would cheerily yell out how good they were from over at the table, while I sat with my empty plate in the lounge.

Your modern mind might like to think the wife would say something—but you can’t imagine the isolation of island life in 80s Canada, or how Stockholm-syndromed to fuck his crushed-down family was.

After what seemed like a year of living in a frozen, half-starved slavery hell, my mother finally showed up in her rusty, little white car.

She was met with hugs and love by them. A glazed 1000-yard stare by me. I watched their fake display of friendship, as if looking through a fun-house mirror. A huge part of me changed that day... and I decided that I was going to have to be a SURVIVOR.

If that meant being a “Bad Kid,” then maybe that’s what it meant.

Fuck... The... World.

That was how I saw it. As soon as I decided this, I saw that I didn’t have to play by the bullshit “Good Kid” rules anymore, and this was very freeing.

I went straight over to their daughter’s Advent calendar, which had only the 1st through 8th of December eaten, and systematically opened up each little door and ate the 9th through Christmas.

Like a chocolate-eating boss.

I felt happier and more fulfilled with each swallow.

I walked out of there, guts full of plasticy, Advent-calendar chocolate, and went and sat in the car, without saying goodbye.

Life went on...

STAR-WIPE TO 20 YEARS LATER

I’m a man grown. Lithe and strong. About 8 years of martial arts training. Years of weight lifting on top of working very physical jobs from the age of 16. Logging, Roofing, Demolition. Seasons of hunting and killing living things... cutting throats, slicing up animals.

Training to bring death.

Black leather jacket. Long black hair. Black steel-capped boots. Hands covered in hard silver rings. I’ve trained and brainwashed myself into a barbaric relic from an earlier time. A time when someone would have no qualms about hurting someone really badly. An avenging angel for a small child.

How much of my life, my look, my mindset had I dedicated to this moment? Only about 85% of it—super mentally healthy.

Justice had come for Bad Man Jan.

I had traveled across the world to Canada and traveled back to this tiny island. I had a balaclava in my backpack and I had a very calm, vicious silent beating planned, with a good amount of hard stomping—something Bad Man Jan would not walk away from. I didn’t want to kill him. I wanted him to live out the rest of his life crippled and broken. But I didn’t even know if he was still there, or alive. I thought maybe I would just go to the spot itself... and maybe some healing would take place. But on the off chance he WAS there... the balaclava to prevent identification was needed.

While on the ferry across to the island I asked a guy who looked like a local if he knew of a guy called Jan, who lived with his family on the island in the 80s. Not only did the guy know him, he hated him, and apparently so did everyone else on the island. Jan was a horrid man who had crossed everyone at one time or another.

The local gleefully told me that about ten years back, his wife had left him, taken the kids, and they all hated him. I guess he had another kid or two later on. Not long after that he rolled his truck while drunk and broke his back. Now he lives, on the welfare, by himself... miserable and in pain in his rotting, old house. I said that was sad to hear as my mother was friends with him in the 80s, and moved quickly to the back of the ferry before the guy got a good look at me.

That was interesting to hear. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

It was early winter, with no snow yet, and I stood at the top of the driveway, looking down at Bad Man Jan’s dilapidated house. I saw the shed, now sagging and crumbling... I saw a woodpile in exactly the same place. I saw a truck with wood in the back, parked right where he used to leave it for me to unload in the snow, twenty years ago. I saw Jan hunched, gray-bearded, old, wheezing, and ragged... Standing head down, leaning on his truck, looking at the wood in the back.

He grabs a piece and starts carrying it over to the wood pile... With a cry of pain, he drops it and almost goes down.

He stands there, clutching his back. I turned and walked away... As simple as that, I had decided to forgive him.

Within a few months, the rings were off, the muscles slowly going, the leather fighting jacket put away and the kicking boots replaced with soft shoes.

“Pain or damage don’t end the world.

Or despair. Or fucking beatings.

The world ends when you’re dead.

Until then, you’ve got more punishment in store.

Stand it like a man…

And give some back.”

If you like the story and want to support me, subscribe, restack and share and buy my book! 500 pages of Gen X storytime goodness.

Kindle

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FVVFHZTS?tag=bk00010a-20&th=1&psc=eniuslink=true

Hardcopy

https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=qpgeD35Sbj5Uk5XRfEycCkaS1djAkDiZDZQX01Q4hN4

Welcome all new Subscribers to My Substack! Each week I’m going to post a story from my massive 500 page book! By gaming the algorithm It roared to the top of the bestsellers, under Punk rock Musicians and Oceania History! Even knocking Dave Grohl off his lofty perch for 8 days. I bet that was a rough week for him…

The stories are fully edited and perfect, unlike the rough form they originally came out in … If you like the story and want to support me, subscribe or buy my book!

Kindle

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FVVFHZTS?tag=bk00010a-20&th=1&psc=eniuslink=true

Hardcopy

https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=qpgeD35Sbj5Uk5XRfEycCkaS1djAkDiZDZQX01Q4hN4

—

If your cheap or not convinced - Just read on :)

This week you get the Introduction.

Introduction

This is an inspirational book. It follows my life as I batter my way from

the freezing gulf islands of 80s Canada, to the wilds of the bush of 90s

rural New Zealand and onto the mean streets of early 2000s Sydney.

This is a nostalgic trip for all of us who grew up in these times and want

to go back and relive it. This book is your time machine. I have finally

written all the stories of my crazy life experiences.

I have told these tales at parties and bars over the last 20 years. This

book is a culmination of a hard and exciting life well lived.

It exists to inspire a new generation to BURN MAN BURN.

These stories will solve your pain. A wise hippie once called me

LAST BEAT.

Am I?

You decide.

These stories will help you lead a fuller richer life—and everyone loves a

redemption story.

No one really likes the stories where the kid is abused, gets addicted,

becomes a crook, and then dies or just kind of rots along screaming at

things in the street.

I now work with addicts and the incarcerated. I know what it’s like

to have that life, and it’s not cool or badass. It’s proper fucked. Fucked

beyond the imaginings of any pampered suburbanite. This does not

mean it’s not funny to write about though.

I was born in Canada in the winter of 76. Shit went sideways fast.

I’m shit at writing fiction. What I’m best at is describing how things

went down.

And so, as one of my Mentors once suggested to me, when I

exclaimed that life was getting too intense, “Buy the ticket, take

the ride... and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you

had in mind, well... maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness

expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.”

I now like to think of my stories as educational trials delivered to me

by life, and I have documented all these wonderful times of my personal

growth, so that others may be entertained from the stories I gathered on

the rough roads I traveled.

And so we begin…

The party house is in that picture. Kuaotunu, Coromandel NZ.

This written after stealing an ounce of weed from my dad and smoking over half of it with two friends at a bush party, through a bong I spent all week ritualistically crafting for this big experience. Why did I smoke so much? I kept packing the cone and firing it, over and over… until the two others quit and spewed and the plastic bong melted. I was trying to kill the pain of a girl rejecting me at school.

I didn’t even get high. I did not know why till years later, in the middle of my chemical dependency counselor training on a chapter on tolerance.

My dad had been blazing weed every day, in our house with all the windows and doors always closed, because it was rural NZ and we lived up in a cold gully in freezing rainy cold mountains.

He was blazing, like 10 joints a day. I had been hot boxing it for years.

I was low grade high the time. So when I tried to actually smoke weed it didn’t work.

Anyway… after the above attempt, I woke the next day feeling sad but creative, and wrote this poem.

BLURSMASH.

So a sticky buds your mate,

One day your brother.

Will pills be your roommate?

Will a needle be your lover?

So depression pushes you sideways…

backwards, but not forth,

You were once married to happiness,

but now you’ve been divorced.

BUT ! She was like a beacon…

Shining through the poison smog….

She spoke to you so gently…

Her eyes like soft blue fog…

But wake up! She hates you man it’s true…

Shit happens to everyone,

Especially to you.

Life’s full of doors of opportunity,

Everywhere you look, they’re there.

And in every locked doors keyhole…

Is the reflection of a fear…

But the closed doors of life…

they don’t hurt that much…

It’s the ones that jam your fingers that throw the biggest punch.

• 
  The poems will continue until my book is a best seller.

• Buy it. Read it. It has NO poetry in it!

• Memories of a Post Grunge Drifter. is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

  Thanks for reading Memories of a Post Grunge Drifter.! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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• Whitianga is a small rural town on the east coast of New Zealand where I grew up. This poem was written when I was 14 ( 1990) after a summer trip to the beach, with my pals to perve on the loopy girls ( Loopy - was a slang term for the Auckland holiday makers ).

WHITIANGA WOMAN. Cringe rating 8/10.

—

Walking down the tempting beach,

Pretty Girlies are in reach.

I love the mammary glands,

But I can’t seem to reach them with my hands.

We’ve been on the beach and in the water,

“Hey mister give me your daughter! “

We’ll just keep perving away,

Being lucky some ….. day.

SO…. the Kindle release was a success and I made it to Number 1 in Punk Rock Biographies. Knocking Dave Grohl of his pedestal.

I bet that was a rough week for him ….

PLEASE RESTACK THIS POST :) So we can get this book out to the point where I get banned from going back to New Zealand and go Full Bukowski.

I also got Number 1 in Best Sellers in History of Australia and New Zealand. For what is the history of those countries if not charting my busted ass escape from the claws of Kiwi witches on the dark rainy island of NZ and the clutching callused hands of Aussie Sheilas in the hot Dust of Australia?

So I want you to buy a copy for yourself or someone you want to mentally damage. If you know any Kiwis or Aussies or Canadians or Americans, then this book directly talks to the Gen X outsider cultural experience and is what they need for Christmas.

If you have a son who needs to know how to be a man, live and survive, this is his manual.

If you need to laugh so hard people look at you like your crazy then this is for you too.

If your a woman between 47 and 60 ( this seems to be my core demographic ) and like to squeal with delight and laugh so hard you piss yourself a tiny bit then this definitely is your book.

If your younger and want to learn what is was like back in the day… this is your history lesson.

THE SEALED SECTION.

As as gift for all you amazing subscribers who buy the hard copy, I have created a large PDF Sealed Section.

It contains all the artwork that was done for the titles that could not go into the book, and a big bunch of amazing paintings / drawings of incidents that occur in the book. AND TWO unreleased stories that are not in the book. They are just too brutal to put in print. The stories are utterly burning. If my book became popular I would never be able to handle some square coming up to me and asking me about the shit that went down in those particular stories.

-

So that’s what you will get if you DM me a screenshot from amazon saying the book is on its way!

So here is the link! Sorry its massive. Just fucking click and buy it. Don’t be cheap. This is an investment in your happiness and the happiness of your fellows.

People will see you reading this book and be like “WHAT the fuck is THAT!”

https://www.amazon.com/Gutter-Stars-Latimer-Redlance/dp/1763679357/ref=sr_1_2?crid=IWRXN3V2AXUA&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.A-81VvOv-WC6ZKttpANs9BxiBpb1j_TS8jm7x8747scYlVg166DVTMc8wEfJEZtf9kPWKG0tiNancFZ42MtdmyI_C_jj7MjE3C1xZp1d1NY.VKIpUHahDhxLqTnNTo6ebZ-ZUp7MNpARha1zAfMfJEg&dib_tag=se&keywords=gutter+to+the+stars&qid=1765900609&s=books&sprefix=%2Cstripbooks%2C143&sr=1-2

Here are some amazing reviews.

I tore through this beast of a memoir in 2 sittings. The chapters were gritty, filled with wild moments of his life. Laughed out loud in so many places, but also found it unexpectedly moving. I kept thinking I’d stop after one more story, and then suddenly I’d finished the whole thing. Unforgettable.

-

Gutter to the Stars is the kind of book you don’t just read, you feel it. From the first page, you’re pulled straight into a world of grit, struggle, and unbelievable resilience. This isn’t a sugar-coated “inspiration” story. It’s real, it’s raw, and it’s written with a level of honesty that stays with you long after you close the book.

What makes this book powerful isn’t just the journey from rock bottom to success. It’s how the author translates every lesson, every setback, and every breakthrough into something deeply relatable. You walk away with a sense of clarity, motivation, and an almost stubborn belief that no matter where you’re starting from, you can fight your way forward.

The storytelling is fast-paced. The insights are sharp. And the emotional punches? They land. Hard.

If you’re looking for a book that will genuinely motivate you, not with clichés, but with truth. Gutter to the Stars is one of the best reads you’ll find. I’d give it ten stars if I could.

Highly, highly recommended

-

I wish I was older so I could be remembering times like these. If this book don’t take off and become the new “On the Road” I will be surprised.

OK Thats it… thats my hard copy pitch. Buy it, Read it. And become fucking awesome because you have these stories as our shared collective experience.

As Substacks Premier Gonzo reporter, reporting live from the Royal Caribbean Enchantment of the seas, I bring you news of a remarkable transformation.

Last night around 5 pm the passengers were dressed in bright colors, and fancy clothes, some as lit up as Christmas trees. White suits were seen and many were singing and dancing. Everyone was talking to each other and screaming with joy and happiness.

This went on around the piano and at the disco till the early hours.

I heard a kiwi accent, and yelled out “BROE!!” Hoping for a for a “YOOO” in reply.

I was not disappointed. A fellow kiwi on the ship. Bruce was his name.

I got chatting and the we both asked each other the question “Why aren’t you hammered like all the other people on the ship”

We both answered it it the same time in the same words.

“Fuck that, 110$ a day for booze - Im way too cheap for that.”

For kiwis there is of course an overwhelming desire to drink… but an even more overwhelming desire to not be ripped off and to not spend money and to be fucking cheap.

Yet we will find, a way.

My way which is to drink the left over drinks that lie abandoned about the ship was thoroughly locked down by my high class wife on first reach “Just to see” if the beer can was still full. And on looking at an abandoned martini for 2 seconds too long she said “If you want a drink we can just buy one”. That stupid idea was dismissed by me out of hand because it cost money and we have booze at home. The booze at home : A nearly untouched bottle of Tamarind Gin that was in the liquor store bargain bin for 5$!

—

Yet unrestrained by a partner this old kiwi guy told me he was drinking the abandoned drinks. He said this with no shame.

He was with one of his people, and knew I would want to know his system.

His system was to just keep walking and watching people who were drunk and forgetful. Good places to pick up the drinks were in the bathrooms and by the elevators. At the start of the day he chose either beer or hard booze.

And he could find and drink enough to get mediumly smashed if he worked at it and skipped dinner.

I said “Well that’s where your gunna blow your margins out - by losing out on the dinner”

“Oh no - I go to the deluxe lunch at the fine dining and I eat tons of those expensive crab cakes to balance it out.”

Such wisdom.

I looked at this old guy and saw how I might have become If I hadn’t married a woman that civilized me.

I felt a bit sad…outside of a spate of late night eating leftover salmon dinners left outside of hotel room doors back in 2018, I’ve been losing money by buying things.

The old me would have snorted in derision.

I said “ Isn’t it good these days that the smoking is so restricted there is no risk of downing a ciggie butt put out in the beer can. That used to happen to me back in the day… fuck that was horrendous.”

I physically shuddered at the memory as any of you who did that just did…

Bruce looked a bit guilty…

“Yeah … yesterday I grabbed a full big can of fosters that had been left in the Casino.. ( where they allow smoking ), and pounded it …I swallowed two ciggie buts in there and ran to the dunnys and spewed.

“Jeezes mate you gotta check that and just start with a sniff and a sip!

“Yeah I forgot and was so excited that it was a full big can”.

And at that I wished him luck… and rolled out before I got too sad.

—

And the transformation? All of those happy dancing people … this morning at brekkie they were a grey hunched silent gollum like lot, drinking water and juice and greenly gumming down fruit and bacon. No eye contact, no chatting in the elevators. Hilarious.

—

Not me! I had a news report to get out so Im on the sun deck with a coffee smashing this out feeling great!