OUT OF TREE.

Going wrong and fleeing south.

As I said before… myself and my friend in mutual debauchery had gone fully feral,

In the town of Napier New Zealand… bless its Art Deco Heart…

Living in an old caravan in the back of the orchard where we worked picking apples… when we could be bothered… which wasn’t often.

Most of our evenings, as the sun went down, were spent driving really slowly through the huge fields of long green grass, next to the orchard, while baked on the Devils Lettuce.

The grass reached the door handles of our beat-up blue Mazda. I would trail my hand out the window and gently touch the grass in a blissful dream world while pink floyd droned at us from out the car’s tinny stereo. We would drive in huge looping slow circles, listening to music, and the susurrus of the grass until the driver would fall asleep and the car would gently roll to a stop. I would reach over and turn the key off and we would sleep in the field.

It’s the simple pleasures, right?

Some evenings the isolation would drive us into a claustrophobic frenzy and the only solution to the feeling was to “Hit the town!”

So we would meander in, sure that we were going far too fast, and pull up by the park in the center of town where we would creep like ninjas up our “hidey tree”.

We were obsessed with hiding from the world and looking down on it from above. We didn’t feel right unless we were perched far up and looking way down on the world below.

Having such a remote viewpoint was the only thing that stopped the fear.
Well, it didn’t really stop it. It was just that when we were hiding like that, the feeling that the whole world was after us and that everyone was judging us and snickering was put on hold because we had found a place to hide for a while.

We would go through periods of severe paranoia where we would have to “go to ground” and hide on the orchid for a few weeks, to moments where we would brazenly walk along the main street smiling at everyone and boldly involving ourselves in loopy conversations with worried looking strangers.

Now as an older wise man… I see the mental fragmentation that was beginning…

This particular night we had decided to go to a party.

This involved driving around the suburbs until we heard one going on, then parking the car outside and psyching ourselves up to get the guts to go in.

We crept in just as the party was starting and walked into the house. We were greeted by a barking Alsatian and two smiling grown-ups who were sitting on the couch in the lounge having a glass of wine and listening to something from the mid-eighties. The kindly-looking father smiled and said “Upstairs boys”.
So upstairs we clambered, sighing with relief that he didn’t ask us a question. We barreled into the upstairs bedroom.
A group of about ten 15 or 16-year-old girls turned to look at us.
We were stunned … I looked about the room … wine bottles, casks of wine, and bags of wine, yes it all seemed to be in order, my paranoid and shy friend could do nothing but shake yet I remained calm and got to happily chatting!

No reason for our presence was given until I had them under my charming spell. By then the story of two wandering drifters who live in a caravan and cruise the streets at night looking for cool people to hang out with seemed like a perfectly rational explanation.

The party slowly started to fill up with young men and women carrying bottles and bags, and a few of the girls left the bedroom and went downstairs to entertain.

My friend and I continued to party in the upstairs bedroom and had finished off a bottle of Mississippi blues” which was labeled as a “general-purpose alcoholic beverage” which was our chosen tipple….and we were leaping and prancing about the room to the music much to the disgust of the few young rednecks who had been pushed up into the room by the growing party downstairs.

A young man came up to us and kindly asked if we would join him and his friends downstairs for a large weed-smoking session funded by them.

Yes Sir ! So down the stairs, we pranced…

I did dress flamboyantly… if you wore too many bright colors in rural New Zealand you would be labeled gay immediately. I was currently wearing a gold disco jacket, a black mesh T-shirt, and fluorescent green tracksuit pants, with army boots and a red beret…

I was not gay in the 90s definition at all, I was actually wearing this peacock uniform in an effort to woo women. I was of course SUPER gay in the 1920s definition.

The whole party seemed to follow us out and within seconds we were standing on the lawn being called faggots by a large crowd of rednecks and Maori gang prospects.

Tricked. We were just happy rascals wanting to have a good time. This was dark…

Some poor kid pushed my friend from behind.

My friend was not only an aggressive PSYCHO whose normal hostile tendencies were greatly exacerbated by drugs and booze… but also 6 foot four and not only very solid but an incredible fan of superstars of wrestling

. So the guy was pushed back, through two rows of surprised and sprawling people, and went upside down into the garden.
Another stupid guy tried to punch my friend in the back of the head but wound up only delivering a glancing blow and making my friend spin around and grab him by the neck, flinging him to the ground with a splat, where the guy lay gasping.

An intoxicated young lady yelled at us “You better go your going to get beaten up!” to which my friend said “Bullshit!” and punched a random guy (whose crime was trying to look tough and menacing) in the forehead so hard I didn’t see where he flew. The sound was so horrific it made people gasp in shock

This was strange … there seemed to be a lot of yelling yet no one actually seemed to have the balls to do anything to us anymore.

Then I saw him coming at me, a big Maori warrior gang prospect kid who was far more than a match for little ole coughing drug addict me. I couldn’t run 50 steps without stopping for a smoke and a lie-down, let alone fight someone.

Yet my utter paranoia had prepared me for situations like this, As you may remember from previous stories I never went anywhere without a large arsenal of weapons.

As he approached I ripped the equalizer from where I had it strapped to my back with duct tape.
A 10 inch long army combat knife, just the thing from my collection for such a situation.
I stood in what I hoped was a professional knife fighter’s stance and declared in a loud and authoritative voice ..

“We are now going to leave and if anyone tries to stop us I will kill them!”

My adversity looked suddenly uncertain of his future and the crowd went kind of white and cleared a path for us to escape to the car.

My friend led the way and we made it to the car but not without a bit of trouble, the Maori warrior kid was trying to get me to put the knife away and fight him man to man while battering me with a tirade of insults to my manliness.

Fuck that. If I was going down, I was going down stabbing.

As my friend opened the door of the car to get in a guy attempted to punch him and my friend had to turn, grab and lift the guy up over his head and throw him down hard onto the road where despite all laws of physics he bounced once and then quietly thrashed around on his back suppressing what I’m sure was the loudest pain scream he never uttered.

I was impressed by the staunchness of it. He diddnt want to seem weak in front of the 40 or so onlookers.

I was detachedly amused by how he suppressed this so that he would not further embarrass himself in front of his friends.

We had got into the car now and I was yelling “GO GO GO!” As the revelers banged on the car and made a huge racket. Bottles smashed against the back window.
The car flared into life!… And stalled.

A triumphant cheer and laughter went up from those surrounding us but then we got going! We thought we were free.

We stopped at the lights fifty meters up the road thinking the whole show was over…but then there came a terrible whacking on my window! It was my gang prospect assailant! He was trying to break the window so I wound it down hoping to stab him with the knife which I was firmly gripping (and would continue to firmly grip for some time to come). Once the window was down a little bit his pudgy hand shot through and grabbed my shirt, the car was starting to take off and I had only a small amount of time to inflict as much damage as possible.

So in one fluid motion (like the matrix only cooler) I wound the window up on his arm, grabbed his little finger and bent it across as far as it would go, and savagely bit into his hand with all my strength, trying as hard as I could to make my teeth connect with bone. This caused him to scream and rip his hand back so fast that it wrench slammed my head up against the door almost knocking me out.
We sped away and I was left with a mouthful of foul-tasting hot blood and large chunks of ragged flesh which I spat out the window.

Two cars were now chasing us and so we blasted through the streets of this town as fast as we could handle. We evaded them after a few minutes with the old indicate right, turn left at high-speed trick, and roared back to our caravan where we sat shaking and rant replaying every exciting moment.

I then for some insane reason decided to call the police from the phone in the orchard office and tell them what happened.

The sergeant who I talked to politely listened to the story and then told me that we should immediately come into the police station to “sort all this out” as people from the party had called them saying that some guy had pulled a knife and threatened to kill everyone.
I assured him that that was not the case and promised to come to the station immediately to “sort it all out”.

Fuck that shit. We did what we did best. Fled.

Minutes later we were packed ( Remember rule number 1 ? “Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.”) and in the car roaring south toward Wellington, safely driving at a few Ks under the speed limit, heading onward and toward new realms of adventure and confusion, which the next few stories will detail.

END

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