NZ slang used in this story:
Dodgy: Anything sinister, wobbly, shabbily made, promiscuous, rotten, swindling, perverted or otherwise unsavory.
Deevo: NZ slang for a deviant person.
Bogan: A redneck subculture in New Zealand And Australia. Characterized by either a mullet or a shaved head, wearing old shitty jeans and a T-shirt bearing a booze ad. Drives a big old noisy and powerful car blaring heavy metal music, usually boorish and violent.
Homebake was a homemade NZ substitute for heroin. Codeine tablets available from chemists were cooked up and purified into morphine or heroin. Rumored to be so impure and yucky that it makes your skin crawl as though you have thousands of spiders scrabbling within you.
So it’s only used by people who like spiders I guess.
So there I was … a young man.
Gainfully employed by Best demolition, a confused Christian demolition company full of good will and bad management. Bad enough that the boss would lend all the company’s money away to crooks he barley knew, so he couldn’t pay the crooks he employed. Which caused the crooks he employed to be angry with him because they didn’t have any money to spend on alcohol, gambling and prostitutes. So they would steal equipment and stock and sell it to a rival company.
The last job we had done had sent the company near to bankruptcy.
We were given our orders, which was the usual, “Go to this address and demolish this house and put all the good timber, doors and windows on the truck and bring it back here.
Which we did with all the exuberance of dudes who are getting paid to smash things.
We had the whole site cleared to a bare dirt square in five days.
There were some things left by the last owner in the house too but a quick call to “base” handled that. “Can we keep any of the stuff the last owner left behind?…sweet.”
So we divided up the stuff, I got a big box of books, clothes a good alarm clock and a few pots and pans and the others got the T.V the video player and the rest.
Unfortunately… for the company (not me as I was but a lowly worker) we had demolished THE WRONG HOUSE!
We were supposed to demolish the house across the road! And when the tenant came back from a holiday down south, the owner found out that his house had been removed and he filed charges, claims, lawsuits and other litigation that signaled the end of Best demolition.
Well we did a good thorough job we couldn’t be faulted on that.
We also had to give the stuff back too which was quite sad as I did like that alarm clock and had already painted it black and glued small toys to it in fondness of it becoming one of my most treasured possessions.
But all this really meant to me though, was that I kept away from the office because the boss looked pretty sad, and my new job became to work around the yard. This entailed sitting on an old couch by a 40 gallon drum and keeping it topped up and blazing with all the worm eaten wood I could get from racks in the yard, and thus “clear out some of this stuff we can’t sell”.
Funny thing was, a good check of the yard revealed that most of the wood ranged in quality from “worm eaten” to “on its way to becoming soil”.
Hmm never mind, it was winter, the dry, dusty wood burned well and I was being paid 350 dollars a week to read a huge cache of 60’s beatnik books that I had recently acquired. Happily reading while sitting on a comfy couch by a warm fire.
So merrily merrily I burned and read my way through the winter.
Now not 20 meters away from my couch was a huge Tower that was used (in times gone past) for making shotgun pellets by dropping hot lead down a huge tube from a high height where it would form into pellets on arrival on the ground below. It was a huge steel framework supporting a high and wide chimney-like tube which went up to a covered steel room towering about 25 meters above the land. The bottom of the chimney-like tube entered the roof of a shabby shack that was almost obscured by piles and piles of ratty shitty things that may have been slightly useful to someone who was trying to build a huge sculpture out of ratty shitty useless junk, like old plastic pipes and soggy pissy smelling foam rubber.
The inhabitant of this shack was a guy we called Dodgy Deevo.
And from my observation he was a dodgy deviant.
Dodgy Deevo looked like a ratty fifty-year-old burnout with ratty yellow teeth and equally ratty yellow/gray hair. He always wore clothes that the young grunge teens of the time wore, except for the addition of dodgy mirror glasses from the 80’s. Always worn to hide his dodgy ratty yellow burnout eyes I suspected.
He would be occasionally seen ushering thin worried looking trench coat wearing teenagers into his shack and after a few hours they would emerge by themselves, more furtive and worried looking and also slightly slower moving.
Through enquiring about Dodgy Deevos’ “occupation and demeanor” by the diligent questioning of “Rizz the Bogan”, (the Ute driving, mullet sporting, violent redneck Psycho who lived in the dive next door), I discovered that Dodgy Deevo was a “Kiddy fiddling, dodgy junkie maggot and if I see him again Im gunna kick his fuckin head in! Called the fire brigade on me the bastard Ill fuckin kill the cunt!”
Ohhhkay.
So I had taken to spying on Dodgy Deevo, my interest being fueled by his dodgy activities. He did indeed seem heavily medicated as he sometimes stumbled into things and only emerged from his shack in late afternoon coughing and glancing furtively about, his fumbling hands all a quiver.
He did not like me waving over from my couch and yelling “Morning man!”
The stream of possibly abused teens did not abate.
The puzzlement I endured trying to speculate as to what exactly was going on in there had me in a spin and so I decided to up my espionage operation.
I waited for him to leave as he usually did for an hour or so around 2. Then I snuck over to the shack and climbed onto the roof.
From here it was an easy thing to scale the ladder that ran up the side of the huge steel pipe and climb up and up into the little house at the top of the tower.
It was empty except for a few beer cans and a moldy looking mattress. The tube exited out the floor of this room and the room was filled with a horrid burning socks smell.
I went over to the window and looked over the city as the tower afforded a great view.
So I stayed up there watching my little barreled fire down in the yard, burn merrily away.
Things started to look fuzzy… I was feeling strange and kind of poisoned. I realized that the burning socks smell must be a bad thing!
Looking down the tube I could see far below, little saucepans, glass tubing and burners.
Deevo had a mini homebake factory going on down there and was using the tube as a chimney to carry the smells of the acids and poisons from his drug lab up and away.
I then heard voices from down there and saw a hand muck with some of the gear in the fireplace…
He was back with some sorry simperer.
I had to get out of here… I also had to spy…so I spied for a while but the combination of the fumes and the fact that I had to take a massive dump and a big long piss drove me to the ladder and I quietly started down.
But then I had a great Idea! Dodgy Deevo was a weasel and I could easily beat his head in if It came to it… so why not….
With my stomach rumbling and my bowels full to bursting with the most rancid and festering mixture of ineptly digested fish burgers, bananas, tinned tuna, onions and Mega Mass 5000 protein shake, I squatted over the chimney.
I started with a good long wee just to get the train moving until the goods car arrived.
Then I let loose a torrent of poisonous foamy and fizzing slush, down down down it dropped, forming a huge cluster of small hot wet pellets (just as the lead that dropped down this pipe sixty years before did.)
It went directly into all the baking gear with an indescribable spattering sound and probably splattered about the room in a most disturbing manner.
I was finished, wiped and on the ladder in one bound. Climbing down as fast as I could (feeling really uncomfortable actually as the last thing you want to do after you have gone to the bathroom is move about swiftly) I leapt from the bottom of the ladder over the edge of the shed and to the ground in one swift movement, skidding and rolling on the gravel and diving onto my couch.
About three seconds later Dodgy Deevo came bursting out of his shack to spin and gaze intently up at the tower. He then slowly and dodgily turned to look at me. Before he opened his mouth I said in a moment of extreme cowardice “I just saw Rizz rush down from the tower, is that who you are looking for …why what happened?” And tried to look as though I had been sitting here innocently all along.
I thought maybe he would try to attack Rizz and be killed…
I realized to my gladness that I was not above arranging the deaths of truly evil men.
Dodgy “maybe dangerous” Deevo slowly turned back to me looking furious.
Regaining some of my composure and reminding myself that I was a hard hitting demolition dude with a fist of steel and a will of iron, I picked up the strongest looking bat shaped bit of wood that was near and said in a more forthright and sinister tone “What happened? you look like you wanna take a swing at someone?”
Deevo said “Nothing” and slunk back inside his ramshackle hut.
I spent the rest of the day shaking and amassing weapons, like bats made of steel pipe and huge broken Frisbee shaped pieces of glass that could cut an enraged junkies head off if thrown with strength and accuracy.
The next morning I went about my business, putting wood into the drum and reading on my couch.
I occasionally tested myself as to how fast I could get to my throwing glass and bats.
Around midday a rough hard looking Demo boss from another company who was looking for some stuff in our yard, saw me sitting on the couch trying to read but being hampered by the constant compulsion to check in the direction of the shack for the appearance of a screaming cold turkeyed out junk monster running at me with some sort of weapon.
The appearance of such an apparition would of course be dealt with by some sort of commando roll/glass hurling bat smackdown combo.
I made the mistake of complaining to the Hard Demo Boss that I was sick of sitting around in front of the fire with nothing to do and made up a story of the good old days where we would demolish a whole house in 5 days like productive and diligent hard workers.
The Hard Demo Boss said “How much these guys paying you to sit around on your ass?”
I told him.
He said “Shit! I’ve got heaps of work for you to do! Ill. work your fuckin bag off and pay ya 400 bucks a week. Go sit in the truck I’ll sort it out with your old boss.”
DOH!
I had blown it and got an actual hard job.
The hard man told my boss I had jumped ship and he drove me to his worksite…
The rain started in and I felt a horrid and unfamiliar feeling. Cold.
I looked to the work site, gray faced exhausted workers stumbled over gigantic piles of bricks chipping mortar away, while other sullen looking dudes stumbled through the ruble carrying bulging armloads of cleaned recycled bricks.
My new boss turned to me and said, “Well what are you fuckin waiting for!? Get into it ya bastard!
Always hilarious, thank you for retelling your adventures.