GUTTER ARRIVAL

Fleeing middle class pamperedness

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.

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