Poison Apple

Is this rock bottom?… No, but it's a start.

So there I was a young man.. 17 … alone … hungry… guts cramping with acidic knives.

Under a bridge on the outskirts of Napier, a sizable farming town in eastern New Zealand.

I was in an old sleeping bag stuffed with my clothes and scrunched-up balls of newspaper for extra warmth.
I was staring into the flames of a small smoky fire, which seemed to be my only friend, the only thing that offered me comfort…I had cut myself off from my friends and family… this didn’t take much doing, family gave zero shits, and old school friends were all happily living their middle class lives…I was living the lonesome hobo life again.

I had fled Auckland, because of Witchy Chin, as detailed in the last story…

I had a desire to live rough. This desire would take me over now and then through life and I would just bail what ever I was doing and go and be a hobo.

I had lasted about 5 months at Wendy’s. Getting sex. Surviving.

Then the Drifterboss urge hit me again…

So here I was… downcountry as we say… at the start of the fruit picking season.

In the 90s in NZ we diddnt have immigrant who do the fruit picking.

Just the insane and destitute.

There are feelings of aloneness in this world… and then there is under a bridge in 1993, with no money, just a few tattered books, ( THE STAND, BRAVE NEW WORLD, THE POTATO FACTORY ) a small fire, and your psychosis for company, feelings of aloneness.

Is this rock bottom?… no but it’s a start.

Hunger would send me out in the evening into apple orchards to steal sour, pesticide-tasting apples which in a short while would turn into a briskly ejected stinging foam.
I had hitched hiked down to Napier way to early and had a week to go till I could start work in the apple orchard so I just slept and read, only venturing out from under my warm bridge and bag shelter combo to forage for food or roadside cigarette butts.

I KNEW I would be OK, and at some point in the future, I would be in a nice warm bed with a good meal in my belly and bag deep in the cooch of a horny woman.

My self confidence has always bordered on the level of supernaturally insane.

But for now, sleep, dreams, cramps.

The day of the start of picking work came and I packed up my smoky belongings and rode my stolen pink womens mountain bike to the orchard.

The kindly boss took one look at me (a hunched shivering weasel, matted dreading greasy hair, a month of fuzz about my face, unwashed, wearing grimy army pants, boots', six t-shirts and an unraveling brown cardigan, teeth green and gray with mank … and asked do you need somewhere to stay?

So now I was sleeping on the floor of the Orchard office and in the days I worked from dawn to dusk picking as many apples as I could.
I managed to beg an advance of 40 dollars from a kindly Irish backpacker who I was working with and rode into town at night to purchase a 5-dollar K.F.C meal deal (savoring every maggoty, greasy bite).

This special meal I had seen advertised outside KFC and had been dreaming of it. It was one piece of chicken. Two rolls, potato and gravy, coleslaw, chips, and a drink for 5$. Carbs and fats super gut blast.

I was on a special extreme hobo diet of one meal of the above a day and apples.

8 K.F.C. meals 75 apples later was PAYDAY.
$450 dollars went into my bank account, which for the last three months had negative $4.25 in it.
Joy, pure joy threatened to engulf me. This meant I could start my climb to success and out of the little dip I had done into homelessness again!

I loved the success climb almost as much as I loved being a fucking bum.

Now I had money It was mandatory that I spend a percentage of it on getting blasted in celebration to reward myself!
The most important things were attended to first.
BOOZE AND FOOD.
Roaring into town on my bike I bought a nine-dollar, 16% percent alcohol, three-liter bag of white wine.

In the liquor stores of NZ there was almost always a cut-in-half wooden wine barrel filled with what we called “baggie o wine”. Almost always bought by teenagers… the amount of poisoning and vomiting these caused was later proven to have almost single-handedly destroyed the NZ wine industry, as it created an entire generation that gagged at the smell of wine.

I stopped right outside K.F.C to spigot drain almost a liter of it down and with the vile bittersweet fluid burning in my guts I strode into K.F.C like a king and ordered the $9.95 super special, got bucks, big man now, going all the way to the TOP, meal deal.

The rest of the night gets a bit hazy but I do remember wandering about Napier with the diminishing bag clutched in a dirty fist and kneeling on the grass in the park purging my body of vile winey poison while raising my fist in a devils salute to passing cheering teenagers and saying ”Its OK, I’m a professional.”

Awaking the next morning to the sound of children playing I scurried away from the reeking piles of greasy vomit that surrounded me and cured myself of my blindness and pain by stripping off to the waist and immersing my upper body for extended periods of time in the freezing duck pond.
Finding my bike where It lay nearby I rode blearily back to the orchard where I lived and went about organizing my life with the new money I had!

Two days later I was sitting on the doorstep of my rented caravan, a big mug of earl grey tea in hand, belly full of tofu avocado, and peanut butter on toast, looking out across the land, the sky purple and orange with a beautiful sunset, within every fiber of my body humming with the powerful thrum of possible hope for a probable future.

I had made it back into society!

I was a real person again.

Now it was time to initiate sinister phase two of the operation… to see how high I could climb so that I could bring it all smashing down!

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END

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