So there I was… a young man.
It was heading toward a dark and dingy NZ Autumn.
I was 17 and certain wrong turns along the road of life ( as detailed in the Gutter Boss Series ) had found me living in the central hollow of a large tree at the bottom of Albert Park in central Auckland.
I had a small backpack containing my worldly possessions, which were two pairs of pants, a woolen jersey, a few shirts, a pencil case, and a notebook filled with assorted musings and scribbles.
I wore a long dark blue trench coat and black army boots. Both would keep me warm as I curled up in the hollow of the tree to sleep the darkened shivering sleep of the homeless.
I once had a good sleeping bag … but I had sold the sleeping bag for forty dollars and was going with the super lightweight hobo option. One of many incorrect decisions I would make over the next few years.
I lived in that park for almost two months, most of the fall of 94.
I was a lost child of Nirvana.
One of the few that the nihilistic grunge tornado had left lying battered and confused in its torn, spiraling wake. A product of bongs, bags of wine and the album Nevermind.
I would wake and peer about for passers-by before leaping out into the freezing dawn.
The only people who ever visited the hollow tree were drunk students coming from the nearby university and needing to piss, but I would gibber and yell like a lunatic when I heard someone climbing in, scaring them away.
The Exact tree. When I was 35 I visited it again with my wife and child and showed them the lines I had carved in the hollow where I lived representing days spent in the tree. 55 in total.
I would wander around downtown talking to random people about random things, sneak into movies, scrounge smokes and feed pigeons small rolled-up bits of paper.
For food, I would wander into food courts and skarf down the remains of up to 10 meals in an hour.
HOBO LIFE HACK: following skinny middle-aged woman about is a good source of streetcarbs.
Staggering from the food court, with a bloated belly, all the goodies sloshing about in me from the dregs of 6 Cokes I would have lie on the pavement outside for an hour as I was so bursting it was too painful to walk.
For the rare shower (going with the warming and protective layer of filth option 9 days out of 10) I would sneak into the University gym where there was hot water and soap slivers aplenty.
I had started hanging out at the university more and more because of the facilities and game rooms. It did have its own little food court but the leaving of the starving students of New Zealand were slim.
I tried to make friends… it didn’t go down well.
They called me Worzel Gummidge after the Living Scarecrow man from “Worzel Gummidge” the BBC children’s program. You tube look up that demented shit.
Worzel lived in a park and went on allsorts of Zany adventures.
They were mean to me, they were uncaring.
People are strange, When you're a stranger, Faces look ugly, When you're alone.
Women seem wicked, When you're unwanted, Streets are uneven, When you're down.
My boy Jim knew my plight.
It got so bad I had a late night meltdown and decided I would get a job!
Back into the world of the living.
Being a FUCKING BUM had run its course. I had passed whatever demented legitimacy test I had set for myself and I felt the fire rise.
Taking time out of my busy schedule, I went to the gym showers. There I scrounged many soap slivers off the floor, which I pressed together into a ball and used this ball to clean my spare shirt, my pants, and the scum from my manky greased-out skinny body.
I found a discarded razor and used it to skin the weeks of matted fuzz from my face.
Attempting to dry my clothes under the gray autumn sky met with limited success so I put them on damp and headed down the main street of town to get a job. I was sure I was in for a grueling and horrible ordeal where I would be seen for what I was, a Worzel Gummidge, and sent packing… but no!
I came to the door of Wendy’s Hamburgers and the delicious smell of what I would later come to call “Wend” sucked me to the counter. I said, “ I want a job!”
The Dude said, “ I’ll get the manager”
The Manager said, “ Here’s your mop, and here’s your uniform”
I was in, with a clean dry Uniform! The warming goodness of 100% Rayon.
I was set, I was on the ultra-high pay rate of NZ 7.25 an hour with the high NZ tax rate comes to about $5.
I soon got given the job of upstairs dining room table clearer awayer and that meant all the half-eaten Wend I could skarf down when no one was watching. As I had nowhere to go and nothing to do, I worked from 8 am till 10 pm. Retiring to my tree after work, to sleep the sleep of the happy and Wend bloated.
Three days after I started disaster stuck, and I don’t mean the mini-disaster of being caught stuffing down half-eaten taco salads (a valuable source of cheese) either.
I was emerging from my tree at 7 am to get ready to start and the early morning Wendy’s crew caught me as they missioned through the park on their way to work.
After they questioned me and discovered that I actually was living in the tree and the laughter stopped I begged them to not tell anyone at the store. They promised they would not tell.
When I arrived the laughter and mocking Ewok jokes gave away the fact that that they had immediately told everyone.
The manager called me in and asked if it was true.
I told him a tale of youth gone astray and how this job was my ticket out of the tree and into somewhere lovely, like a dank cellar or maybe even a moldy-smelling basement.
When he stopped laughing he told me he would lock me in the store overnight and I could sleep in the upstairs dining room until morning as long as I hid down and didn’t let anyone see me. Then I could wake up and work until close. When he asked what I had been living on I tried to convince him it was leaves, twigs, and grubs and not half-eaten burgers and scooped-out baked potato rinds or leftover cold fries, that I would hide in my pockets and then shame eat, in the bathroom.
Payday came and my hard work had seen me receive a whopping check of about 400 dollars for around 90 hours work.
I was back in the game! A real human boy!
I secured myself a place to live for 40 dollars a week in the laundry of a student flat. I lived between the washer and the drier in a huge mounded nest of clothes I had bought for 5 dollars a garbage bag full from the salvation army. When it was cold I would burrow deep into the nest; when it got really cold, I would just put another old man suit on.
Life was good.
I continued to work at Wendy’s for about six months. And due to my food foraging skills, I never had a food bill!
I still love Wendy’s to this day… and strangely I formed a powerful attachment to red headed women. seeking them out over all others… as a few future story’s will detail.
Probably not related….
END
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Even small stretches of life on the margins make for much better writers.