Whacky Stick.

Now Crimes and a swift descent into Madness.

So there I was, a young man … Far away from parents, teachers, well-meaning friends with good advice, or any other civilizing influences.

I had decided I wasn’t going down fast enough and so I made a phone call to a friend who was totally insane.

I told him I was living in an old caravan on an apple orchard and needed a friend to go crazy with.

He got off the couch at his mums house in Wellington and drove 5 hours straight to me.

As you may have surmised from reading my stories, I always felt a kin to the truly demented. It was as if I needed someone more crazy than I, to hang with…

A mutual friend in debauchery…

Pairs such as these happen now and then…

Withnail and I.

Hunter S Thompson and Oscar

Cornelius and Tyler…

We thus is was with us.

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

Life was a haze of dope smoke and huge mouthfuls of “Mississippi blues” which was labeled as a “general-purpose alcoholic beverage”.
It had a trio of dank looking black jazz musicians and a riverboat on it…

It was a thick and syrupy dark yellow mixture that tasted like cough medicine mixed with kerosene. At 30 %, and 10 dollars a liter it was only the numbers that mattered to us … and then after we had drained the filthy brew, (always wincing and letting out a rebel yell followed by our catchphrase “Nature, she’s a savage beast!”) little mattered.

A wacky team must have a catchphrase…

Filled with an ever-present dread that feels as if one is running up an ever-collapsing stairway, the type of dread that fills anyone who knows they should be being good and yet is not heeding the voice that tells them to get this train back on the rails.

I had been heeding that voice for so long now that I was trapped.

Trapped because I was addicted. Addicted to many things, one of them being the whacked-out zany hijinks and tomfoolery-filled adventures that heeding the voice took me on.

What really got me going was DANGEROUS ADVENTURES!

I had a comrade in debauchery now. A crazed scallywag, that within a few years would wind up pushing his zany hijinks too far and be arrested and incarcerated in a mental hospital.

Not before I got off the crazy train though, blessed be.

People like that make great friends if you are terrified of boredom and dont want a calm-filled life.

Your dear author was on this rickety mine cart… and down we go…

The stories get rougher from here… but …as my mentors motto was…

“Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten."

…Fill your boots.

…

My comrade in debauchery and I were at that moment watching a less-than-savory Eddie Murphy comedy video, eating food taken from the fridge, drinking tequila, and smoking weed with our feet up on the glass coffee table.

Nothing seems overly wrong with that scene outside of it not being very healthy.
Yet it was horribly wrong. We were jittery Goldylocksesque interloping naughty fellows.

The house belonged to a Maori family who were on holiday in Fiji. Their long-awaited, hard worked for family holiday. Happy photos of them beamed accusingly down at us from the walls, their dark eyes following me at all times.

We were there because once again my silver tongue had won over the weak of will. We had picked up a young hitchhiker who was on his way to feed a cat belonging to some friends of his; A Maori family who were having their first family holiday together in Fiji.

Plying him with comradery and stories he let us in, on the promise that we would feed the cat for the next two days and then leave the place as we found it. Promises were swiftly made and we had a free hotel complete food booze and as many long-distance calls as one wanted to make.

We stayed the night in unfamiliar-smelling beds and the next day were helping ourselves to everything there (Why not? It will probably just go rotten anyway…), not forgetting to feed the cat, as was the arrangement.

We were men of our twisted word.

So while in a peacefully paranoid state we watched the video.

Until… Suddenly the sliding door burst open! Screeching in flew a skinny wiry old Maori woman, brandishing a long thick dangerous-looking Whacky Stick! She pointed at our stunned and terrified faces and proclaimed in a high shriek “How dare you come into someone else’s home and watch their T.V!!”

She was red-faced and livid with rage.
I scrambled up, the silver tongue kicking in on impulse, immediately firing all the blame at the young man who had let us in and orating a story that was being made up as rapidly as it was being told: that the young man had told us this was his uncle’s house and he had asked said uncle if we could stay a few nights, and that aforementioned uncle had said it was fine and we were but unwitting dupes tricked into feeding a cat!

The whole time I was gathering up the dope and the booze and ramming it into my bag while edging towards the door.
My friend was not so wise and tried to make a break for the bedroom where his stuff was, not being possessed of the kind of future sight that the perpetually paranoid are darkly gifted with.
Rule number one of living in the HEAT.

“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.”

She cut him off with a vicious swing of the Whacky Stick and he caught it cracking across the side of the head, he caught another one across the back as he ran into the master bedroom. I was outside by then, cowering in the shotgun seat of the car, praying that my friend would prevail and beginning to formulate a plan if he did not and was killed. About 30 seconds and a whole lot of swearing and crashing and repeated hard stick beatings later my bloody-faced companion leaped out of the house and into the car, roaring it into life. The lady was directly after him, dentingly smacking the Whacky Stick once across the bonnet she then went to work on the left headlight, destroying it utterly with two well-placed blows.

It was to remain unfixed for over a year, a cyclopean reminder of that crazy day.

We roared backward out of the narrow fenced-in driveway so fast that the right-wing mirror was ripped away and exploded into fragments.

Spinning the car about we whizzed off into the day.

One more substantial sector of that town a no-go zone.…

---

END

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