We had fled Napier after the shit the went down as detailed in the last story “ OUT OF TREE” and drove 6 straight hours to Wellington.
We rolled up to his place and we moved in and started living there with his mum.
Harried, 47. (Wow… my age now…) had a 7 year old kid to some random. Worked as a bank teller. Miserable as fuck. Good bottle and a half of mid range red a night.
Real class act.
Me and my mate were 18… and he had a 5 gallon metal bucket packed full of stolen weed that he had hidden under the shed out the back.
So we starting living there, and by living, I mean spending all day on the couch blazing weed and watching TV while my mate screamed at his mum to bring us food…
Which she would, bless her.
We had into a good solid routine.
Wake up 2: 00 pm.
Lie on the couch, starve till his mum got home, then eat the food that was brought to us, smoke bowl after bowl of spirit crushing mind numbing old dope and watch “SKY TV” (the eight cable channels you could get in NZ for 20 dollars a month).
6 :00pm . Go for a walk down to the beach and breathe in the healing salt air.
Lyall bay it was.
It’s important to get out of the house.
7:00pm. Back to the couch.
Midnight. Crawl to our respective rooms and black out.
Sleep 14 hours a day.
On Friday we would get the bus into downtown and wander about seeking hidey places to look out at the world from and smoke dope in.
Commenting on people while refusing to interact with anyone but shopkeepers.
That was the rules.
Sometimes we would get baked and then go to Pizza Hut then to a movie.
At Pizza Hut we would buy a 1 litre Carafe of white wine each, and pound it while each eating a large Hawaiian Pizza.
Life was simple.
Working our way through the big cookie tin of weed.
Full TV world plus hiding. Pizza Hut feasts… and the movies.
We had had enough adventure and excitement out there in the big bad world.
I was not to last forever though.
We refused to listen to the well-meaning shrill and ranty advice of his mother, about how we should do some higher education (excuse the pun) or perish the thought get a job!
We ignored her, mostly replying in grunts, and if she was interrupting a show my friend would get up from the couch in a rage and force her out the door of the lounge, while I stared mullet like at the Box trying to hear the show over her loud screams of protest.
After about two months of this she told on us to her huge and angry bricklayer brother who took it upon himself to burst through the door one night.
In the middle of The A team too, the cheek of it.
“STAND THE FUCK UP!” He yelled at our degenerate zombie like forms.
We burst up off the couch like there was snakes on it, and were standing at attention in seconds, while he battered us with an angry verbal tirade that tore tattered holes our fragile stoner life belief system.
He had given us a simple choice, a 180-degree life change, forsaking our warm cozy numb lives of 8 hours of being “awake” per day and straightening the fuck up, or being beaten like the insolent children we were and then dragged out onto the street not necessarily in that order.
Within 3 minutes we had promised to go to the cities polytechnic and learn ourselves up on some sort of skill that would facilitate our smooth transition off the couches and into the real world of people living gainful productive lives.
Even for us in our degenerate dream state it was not a hard decision.…
1994 Tough love at its finest.
So we went to the Polytechnic, and did the easiest course they had. Tourism and Hospitality.
Sadly this just got us into contact with harder drugs ( STOOLS ) and more losers like us who had been kicked off couches by screaming parents.
A polytechnic is often like a government funded community college for fucking losers….Sometimes its not… there did seem to be some people paying attention there… but I didd’t talk to them…
We didn’t last long there, just a few months, the whole getting up in the morning thing wasn’t really for us.
So we and fled back to the North… to our friends oasis of ill repute.
The Purangi Winery, located on the east coast of Coromandel peninsula which was our original home.
Our friends hippie dad owned it.
It was a haven where a young man could while away the hours of the day, drinking before staggering through the undergrowth looking for good places to fall unconscious in the recovery position.
We spent a few weeks there living in a rotted out Caravan.
Back when we were 15 and 16 school kids, full of hope, we would head out and stay over at this friends place on weekends, at the winery.
I remember an interesting conversation with my Father at the dinner table, having just turned 17, once the school year ended.
Me: “Im not going back to school next year.
Him: “OK! So your going to come up into the bush and work for me?” ( He owned a large logging company )
Me: “No. I’m going to have a wee rest.”
Him: “ Like fuck you are! Not on my fucking dime your not!”
Me: “Well then I’ll go work at the winery.”
Him: “You’ll fuckin die.”
Me: “Yes… I may die… But at least I’ll die free”
( I did basically die three times.
1. Alcohol poisoning.
2. Going over a cliff in a car, while all of us drunk.
3. Swimming in big waves at Hot Water Beach while stoned and drunk after spending hours in the sun.
But you cannot kill that which does not live. So I rallied to keep partying. ;) )
My Dad knew what “Working at the Winery” meant for a young skallywag of 17. A summer of doing about 2-3 hours of faking work about the winery during day then spending the rest of the day blazing weed and pounding liqueurs.
Then an afternoon of cruising the beach looking for tourist girls to bring back to the winery half barrel jury rig spa pool we had made.
“Hey come to our Winery!”
Swedes and Norwegian girls YES.
Germans and French NO!
Brits if you were desperate or an animal.
Weed and wine and a floating salami and cheese board in the tub and if the stars aligned and your date didn’t barf or black out and half drown you were in for a good night.
No phones in sight… just lots of looking into each others faces and telling stories to each other till you were so horny you ripped each others clothes off and spent the rest of the night rolling about on top of a sleeping bag giggling.
If your over 40 you know what I mean.
forgive me… I digress…into Gen X nostalgia…
Now I was not the person at 18 who arrived at that winery a year later that I was at 17, all free from school and full of Vim and hope for the future.
The happy go lucky extrovert I used to be, had become a crazed gollum like creature…
The Engollumfication is detailed in the previous 13 stories.
All taking place in my ANNUS HORRIBILIS : 1993.
We showed up… insane… and on the run from the weasels…
We stayed a week but we were too nuts even for the standards of our Winery mates… and so we drank our fill of the place but I knew we had to move on…
Jesus! Bad waves of paranoia, madness, fear and loathing, intolerable vibrations in this place. Get out! The weasels were closing in. I could smell the ugly brutes.
I decided we had to “go to ground” and hide until the storm blew over.
We had to find a good place to lie low which was comfortable and secure from the ravages of all and any semblance of responsibilities, dirty looks, worried glances, concerned conversations about facing life, or any chance of running into school friends from a year before and having them ask “Bro are you ok? Cause you look well munted.”
The compatriot had a place in mind.
Great Barrier Island. – The promised land.
The Baz.
He had grown up there…
A haven for people like us seeking respite from the ravages of reality.
An island off the coast of New Zealand it had been a pirate like hide out for hippies and burnouts for years. People there would understand us. They would not judge us and they would leave us alone if we just wanted to hole up and gibber.
The hut he had grown up in was in a very secluded place, an oasis in that utopia like land, where marijuana plants grow wild and so large they had to be harvested with chainsaws.
We could stay there. There we would be safe.
The hut now belonged to his scary yelling uncle but he was in the far away city and thus the hut would be ours for the entire summer or more!
We readied for our journey.
Tune into part 2.
END
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I had a Hot Water Beach weekend with a young lady from Nottingham, after which we were a thing for about a year and a half.
Silly girl thought she could talk me into moving to England. LOL.
What was the name of your old man’s logging outfit? Is he still in business? He’d know the log truckers I worked for down in Rotorua, RFH. My mate is an owner driver for them out of The Mount, he’s up the Coromandel all the time.
I had one of those custom Hi-Viz shirts from my mate Nigel, who before he got into log trucking with his dad at RFH, worked for Ross Davis in Whangamata, which is up your Dad’s way if memory serves correct.
People could never pronounce Whangamata whenever they saw the shirt here in North America.