What the world has a dearth of these days, is demented old bastards in pubs that basically live in the pub and annoy people with their twisted old stories about rationing during the war and how they ingeniously got around it.
People forget the WW2 rationing of goods such as sugar cloth, tires, petrol and meat.
If you want to educate yourself on this to make this story make more sense, here is the link:
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/rationing-during-wwii
( If your just here for entertainment and not homework just read on)
Well these old guys were there in the pub to make sure no one forgot.
You can’t smoke in pubs now and many pubs are not so much the social gathering places anymore due the phone bullshit. Those times are gone.
But they were alive and well in NZ in the late 90s. Where if you were 18 or so you would be a very small fish in a pub bowl of tough working men, twisted alcoholics and crazed floozie lush’s.
You had to politely get your beer and hide in the corner, because fighting was a thing.
I’m not saying that pockets of pubs like this don’t exist around the world, but with the advent of smartphones, and the testoserone destroying prevelence of internet porongoraphy, soy, roundup in the food and plastics, most pubs I’ve been into in the last twenty years are “Gayer than Aids” to use a phrase from back in the day.
Filled with fat bellied fake men with thin arms, high pitchedly screaming at sports they never played, eating troughs of sugary fatty food and drinking weak roundup gmo poison beers.
They look like tubby fat children, faces red and bloated with inflammation...
It seems to me that men’s voices are higher than they were in the 90s..for some reason…
no balls maybe…
I feel safer than in the 90s where the bars were filled with singlet and boots wearing macho gorrilla’s spoiling for a fight… but that safety does not make me happier.
I digress into GenX nostalgia and bitter social commentary… forgive me… and keep reading please…
So anyway it was in one of these pubs of rural NZ that this story occured.
It had that perfect smell of spilt rotten beer, stale cigarettes and body odor.
That smell will never be forgotten by one who has inhaled it. It’s almost extinct.
It’s only created by decades of spilt rotten beer, stale cigarettes and body odor, seeping into industrial carpet.
If you know you know. Once you're inside and have got a few ales and smokes down your black guts, you can’t smell it anymore, but on entering the pub, its welcoming “Abandon Hope and enter Oblivion” smell always hit you.
Ok so it was onto this scene that my friends and I would slink after a hard day at work in rural New Zealand 1993. I was 17 and that was old enough to be in the bar. I could grow sideburns and act serious, and thus could buy booze.
Our job was trimming the lower branches off mono crop planted pine trees, with little saws, and for this we got 1$ a tree. If you went all out you could make about 200 dollars a day.
If you got up and ten and smoked weed all day you could make 100.
Anyway we would go to the Pub every night for a meal and a few jugs of the cheapest beer in New Zealand. It was called “Coromandel Bitter” and for some reason you would always have to run to the toilet with the most brutal shits after about two glasses… but then you were ok…
It was utter swill with every corner of the brewing process cut. But it was only 5$ a jug.
It was discontinued after a year probably due to the bars losing money on toilet cleaning supplies and people buying it over other beer which was twice the price…
OK! I hope I have set the scene.
This story is about twisted old dude rabbiting on about rationing and how he got around it with true Kiwi ingenuity.
So this particular super old demented alcoholic was called Bobby Saton.
But everyone called him “Babbie Satan”. Because he was twisted and evil. And his Kiwi accent was so thick and he had so few teeth that when he introduced himself it sounded like "Babbie Satan".
He wore an old black trench coat, brown polyester pants, rubber boots, and had thin black dyed hair in a comb over. He was short with a pot belly.
He was missing teeth, his breath was foul, his eyes yellow, his nails hooked, longish and nicotine stained. He smelt just slightly of piss.
He was probably about 80. He would wander from person to person starting loud blurting conversations with “Back during the war…
When asked why he didn't fight “Oh I had a gammy leg back then and they wouldn’t let me sign up.”
Like most of the rubbish he would spout it was continuously changing lies.
Everyone hated him but tolerated him. People said he killed his wife and had a kid that ran away…
Ok you get the scene... where are people like this now? Modern society just creates bums that then die early I think...
On entry to the bar people would yell “BABBIE SATAN MY MAN!!” and laugh.
And he would smirk and raise his glass.
One day he brought himself and the warm beer he was nursing over to our little corner booth where we would hide, and said...
“Move in you little cunts, I see you hiding over here. Buy me a drink I’ve got a story your gonna wanna hear.”
We didn't want to do any of those things… but we also didn't want to draw attention to ourselves…
So I got up to buy him a beer…
Quick as a flash Babby Satan held up two fingers and yelled out to the Publican...
“Two whiskeys in the Barrel for me Jim!”.
Jim nodded and marked something down on something.
So now he had a “Credit” of two whiskeys at 10$ each on us … on account.
Wow. Just Wow. Such scammer skill I wasn't even mad.
I was impressed.
He launched into his story.
Back in the war petrol was rationed and he and his mates never had enough to get around. They worked the shearing sheds on the sheep farms in the top ranges of the mountains ( Which had since been converted to pine mono crops and co-incidentally was where we were now working doing the pine trees).
To save money he and his mates would push the car from the top of the mountain along the road to the first hill and then by utter skill as ONLY possessed by those in the old days, caroom and coast the unstarted car the entire 20 kilometer drive down the mountain to this very pub.
You had to build up a lot of speed and be so skilled to get round the corners without breaking and be going fast enough to get up the hills that were there, but they would do this every day and thus save enough gas to be kept in beer money for the entire war.
He repeatedly emphasised that :
"No modern truck or person is this bullshit day and age could do it… as the trucks are too light and no one these days has the skill because you kids these day are all pissweak faggots, present company very much included."
And that's an exact quote.
And with that he saw someone else come in that he wanted to fleece and departed our booth leaving nothing but a slight pissy odor… and our incredulous loathing.
After work that day as the three of us piled into the truck at the top of the mountain, I said…
”Hey what if we could do it…that would fucking show that Babbie Satan eh?”
So we tried...
We failed miserably… running out of steam on the first hill.
But we kept trying.
Coasting faster and faster, taking turns more and more dangerously… getting up to 110 kph on the big dip straight shot down the mountain and barely rolling over the lip at 10 kph, cars honking madly behind us.
Almost going over the cliff multiple times due to taking the corners too fast as we diddnt want to lose any speed…
The best we got was running out of speed on a long flat after a curve, 500 yards before the final 3 k downhill to the pub.
We couldn't get past it…
Then I remembered what Babbie Satan said about the WEIGHT of the trucks back then.
Of course! Our piece of shit tinfoil thin Toyota ute was too light!
The next day we overloaded the truck bed with heavy wet logs.
We could barely push it to the starting point.
But holy shit did it fly. With that extra weight we skidded round the cliffside corners twice and almost went up on two wheels but we got to 120K down the long shot mountain drop.
We coasted along the flat for its entire length, cruised down the final hill and triumphantly skidded into the pub parking lot!
Running into the pub in a high exhilaration we saw Babbie Satan at the bar, but as always facing the door to see who was coming in.
We ran up to him cheering wildly and startling people in the pub…
“We fucking did it! We went all the way from the Top of the range to the pub with no gas! It took us two weeks but we fcking did it, just like you did back in the day! What do you have to say about that you old bastard!”
Babbie Satan looked shocked… he could believe what he was hearing.
This could not be!
His mouth opened and closed like a goldfish and then his face closed up and he squinted and smirked at us…
“Your a pack of lying cunts. It can’t be done!”
We protested that we had done it and the only thing he would say was
“Can’t be done.” “You’re lying cunts”
When we kept insisting, he got up and walked off to the other side of the bar.
We just stared… and laughed…got our beers and went to our booth hiding spot.
He somehow cursed us with his evil nay saying and we never did it or mentioned it again.
-
But dear reader, you now know that we did it.
And we showed Babbie Satan that young forestry workers in the 90s still fucking had what it took to drive dangerously and almost kill themselves to prove an old man wrong.
I look forward with all my heart to being the Babbie Satan of my generation.
That smell is my childhood haha... Smoke, beer and BO... my dad took me to the bar with him during the day and buy me a plate of fries or a burger while he daydrank with his buddies. Good times, I miss it.
Awesome story, your writing and adventures always crack me up, thanks for sharing, it’s pure gold.