Crimechurch

2. Going Wrong In Your Own Way

The burns from Jadey’s fireworks, the hiding, crying in the bushes, stumbling home, sleeping in a bed of puke … it was useful, all that. I needed the p***y slapped out of me.

I wake up with a text on my phone from Joel Lin, saying he’s got me a 2HC t-shirt and him and Jade are going to the pool and they’ll pick me up. We head vaguely towards QEII pool but never make it past Colombo Street. Colombo invites us to make mayhem. Everyone’s an uncaring capitalist clone. f**k ’em. We put dry ice bombs in a Coke machine, pour petrol in a clothing bin outside a church, we borrow Mumsie’s credit cards and get out $300 cash, then Joel gets busy and Jade gets busy, and they both sorta forget about me and I find new friends at school I’ve never noticed before—friends with homemade tats and pregnant girlfriends. Risky people who make my heart race. The whole 2 Hard Corpse Jade Slattery thing was like a new pair of shoes I couldn’t quite fit.

We cruise the flat streets, yell s**t at people out the windows as we drive by, splash each other with shaken-up beer. We barely see older or younger people, only peeps our age. Our strata of 17. Our universe has no parents to tell us off. We are a tribe of teens ruling the world, no responsibility, fake IDs for all, f*****g skanks and f*****g each other, waiting for Saturday nights so we can walk into parties in Somerfield and scrap with private school bourgeois pigs. Jade has hardened me up to fight when the revolution comes. There’s riots on TV at the G8 Summit. People smash up Starbucks. It’s electrifying. School can’t contain me. There’s a battle zone out on the streets. I’m being called up.

I read tons of books. I listen to that Naomi Klein journalist-lady on my headphones. I hang out on Reddit and we talk about everything controversial. Psychedelics, anarchism, cyberpunk.

Ken Kesey said, ‘He who marches out of step hears another drum.’ He was talking to me when he said that, directly to me. Think for yourself; question authority; redefeat fuckin’ high on drugs. That’s me, yo. Every time I skip school and get off the bus in Cathedral Square and smoke weed and kick around a hacky sack with the hippies, they pull back the curtain a little more. Show me what’s beyond the visible spectrum. Comfort is complacency. Every lounge suite, every sedan, every heat pump my parents buy, it’s The System trying to make them soft so they’re easy to conquer. The world is oppressive. The world needs me to fight it.

He who marches out of step hears another drumMy last day at Hillmorton High School doesn’t start out being my last day; it’s just Mr Mohammed keeps telling me to pay attention. We’re supposed to be copying his dumbass PowerPoint onto A2 paper but I’m writing some serious words of revolution and when I hold my poster up, the Establishment trembles.

Teacher stands in front of the class

Teacher stands in front of the classBut the lesson plan he can’t recall

But the lesson plan he can’t recallThe student’s eyes don’t perceive the lies

The student’s eyes don’t perceive the liesBouncing off of EVERY f*****g WALL

Bouncing off of EVERY f*****g WALLHis composure is well kept

His composure is well keptHe fears playing the fool

He fears playing the foolcomplacent students listen to some of that

complacent students listen to some of thatBULLSHIT he learned in school

BULLSHIT he learned in schoolWE GOTTA TAKE THE POWER BACK.

WE GOTTA TAKE THE POWER BACK.Mr Mohammed tells me to go wait out in the hall and I just grab my bag and slap a bunch of palms and bail, leaving my poster as my epitaph.

Rage Against The Machine: 1. Mr Mohammed: 0.

Rage Against The Machine: 1. Mr Mohammed: 0.Half a dozen of us sign out permanently, collect our leaving certificates, and gap it. To celebrate, me and the boys spend a whole night on the farming expo showgrounds out at the far end of the Dirtmounds, squirting each other with fire extinguisher, shaking up beers, shooting potato guns at cows, cutting wires with fire axes, burning anything plastic with our lighters.

Still drunk at dawn, we drive to the Waimak, a desert of stones with a cold opal river twisting through it like a ribbon.

We set fire to Johnny Rabies’ car and push it in the river. Johnny Rabies runs his mouth as always; he convinces us all he can get insurance money for it. It burns as it floats, like a Chinese lantern, giving off gas bubbles and an oily rainbow bloom.

The insurance thing doesn’t work out and I get ordered to go to a family conference. I can’t cope with little Favourite Son Winston staring at me, looking all holy with his Scouts gear on, and I ask Mr Favourite if he wants a fight, then storm out.

My tribe picks me up in the parking lot, of course. My tribe don’t think I’m abnormal. We smoke a sesh but the weed’s not quite potent enough and luckily one of the boys has got a strain he calls Hot & Spicy that’s been soaked in speed and that gets our hearts racing.

They dare me to drive down Colombo Street on the kerb for fifty straight metres without hitting anything. We send a couple rubbish bins flying, spook some buskers. Yeah b***h! f**k paving stones! f**k the Arts Centre! It’s all Illuminati anyway. I have to go to Youth Court for that. I get a suspended sentence. It means if I get in more s**t, I have to go back to court. Pffft. Boo-hoo. I’m growing me some dreadlocks and a yellow goatee, and my eyes have sunk into tired black pits in my skull. Chuck me in jail, I don’t care. Just take me away from this hypocrisy you call the first world.

Yeah b***h! f**k paving stones! f**k the Arts Centre! It’s all Illuminati anywayI live with my olds, but only ’cause I don’t have enough work to get money to pay rent on a place. I stay up all night, get up at lunch, and guzzle milk out of their milk bottle. I use up their internet watching videos about the brewing industry’s conspiracy to ban weed. I’m the last one awake at midnight. I drink my dad’s brandy in the small hours, snort my mum’s Prozac. At the dinner table we get into these debates and I tell them they’re wasting their money on lounge suites and Indonesian statuettes when there’s real exciting s**t out on the street to spend on. Pills, man, powder! Pipes! Prozzies! f**k comfort. Go wild. Blow it all at the casino, Dad, before you die.

But nah. Eating the chocolate chips and hazelnuts from mum’s baking supplies is as edgy as it gets at 91 Charles Upham Ave.

To stop their nagging, I finally agree to do an apprenticeship. I sign up for the first course in the first book in the pile of glossy handouts my dad dumps in front of me; it’s plumbing he wants me to do, apparently.

Fine. Whatever.

The boys at work don’t really like me ’cause I rock up on time, but then I take my morning s**t in the toilets, using up a good 20 paid minutes, reading MAD magazine. I come out and there’s a confrontation ’cause the boys don’t believe me that shitting on the boss’s time is how workers start a revolution.

They say I oughta go work for my mum instead. Put on a Century 21 blazer and sell houses, attaboy. f**k these guys. My parents are from Cape Town. They’ve seen real dirt and danger. They know I’m capable of better but capable of worse too. They see me walk in the door with the collars of my t-shirts torn, my eyebrow ring ripped out and believe soon enough I’ll be scared straight.

They’re wrong. I ain’t scared yet.

It’s winter, some shivery indigo night in July. I drink a box, then get chucked in the cells for climbing up the frosty Chalice and pissing into the cold wind. It’s 5 am when I get bailed and sent home to my bedroom. All I want to do is sleep and feel sorry for myself but Mumsy comes into my room with a tray of dinner and a pile of folded fresh towels, then Dad comes in in his dressing gown and tells me they’ve got some money set aside, “To pay for a barrister, if you’re in trouble again.” He’s asked for a hook-up from his friend in the Probus Club to get me a full-time gig with Otautahi Plumbers. To help me get comfortable.

Comfortable? COMFORTABLE?!

I crank the stereo, blast some Rage, wake the house, scream into the night, ‘f**k YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELLL MEEEE.’

FUCK YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELLL MEEEE.I turn the bed over, smashing my bedside lamp. The bulb pops with a whisper of smoke. I clomp down the stairs and pack all my s**t into the boot of the Nissan Skyline I’m not supposed to be driving. My little brother follows me to the doorstep in his Yu-Gi-Oh boxer shorts, folds his arms, tells me I need to stop shaming the family.

Four and a half years younger than me and he thinks he’s the man of the house.

I spew a sloppy, drunken Dostoyevsky line in Winston’s face. ‘Going wrong in your OWN way’sh better than, better than going right in someone ELSH’s.’

‘Words of a condemned man,’ Winnie yawns, bathing me in shame for not being as perfect as him.

I knock him down with a right hook. His head hits the door frame and he slithers onto the Welcome mat and starts crying. Knock em down / skull to ground. But that’s– but that’s not me…

Mumsie and Dad build a wall around him with their backs.

I disappear.