by Mark Hunt
League was a natural fit for me. I was big for my age, strong, quick on my feet and unfazed by the licks that you had to take playing the game. The boys used to play rugby at lunchtime. Sometimes I’d join the game, sometimes I’d ruin the game. When I wanted to ruin the game, I’d take the ball and slowly walk back to my try line. Then, even more slowly, I’d walk towards the opposition try line, daring someone to try to tackle me. If anyone ever did, they’d get their ass beaten.
It was the world’s stupidest way of playing rugby, especially for someone like me who really enjoyed competition and was genuinely good at the game. I can justify a lot of what I did as a kid, but I can’t for the life of me remember why I played rugby like that. It was a dumb way of playing the game, and an even worse way of making friends but, oddly, I did.
When I met Johnno, he was new to our school, having been kicked out of his class for belting a teacher. Maybe he didn’t understand the way I played rugby, maybe he did; either way, when he and his friend Derek saw me walking slowly with the ball, they ran straight at me. After they bounced off me, I whipped both their asses. Johnno didn’t care. First he fought back and when he couldn’t anymore, he just stood there and took it. In him I saw familiarity; this wasn’t the first beating this kid had ever suffered. Right there and then on the oval, we became friends.
It was with Johnno that I first made myself known to the cops. I’d been coveting all the things the other kids took for granted my whole life: food, shoes, bikes, T-shirts, video games. Now, with Johnno, I realised all I needed to do to get these things was just go out there and grab them.
The first time the cops picked me up was for stealing shoes. I was at one of the malls near my house when Johnno noticed that one of the shoe shops had an open window that led to the car park. While I was handing a pair of shoes – Timberlands, I think – out to Johnno, a couple of big, meaty man-hands clamped down on me. The store security guard held me at the shop until the police turned up. The cops threatened me with this or that, but I didn’t give a shit about whatever they were going to be levelling at me; I was only worried about how badly I was going to get beaten when my old man found out.
That scene was repeated over and over again, and soon I even stopped worrying about how badly I was going to get beaten when Dad had to turn up at the cop shop. Those beatings were notes in a symphony. In trouble with the police or not, I was always in line to get the shit beaten out of me, regardless of what was going on.
In my latter high school years, school started to become physically unbearable. If I went to all the classes I was supposed to go to, then I’d spend all of my time being bored and angry at school, or terrorised and despairing at home.
Fuck that. I was going to carve some time out for me. By the time I went to secondary school, you would’ve been more likely to find me at the school grounds on the weekend than you would’ve during the week. It was at school on a Saturday where I met Simi and Eti, a couple of tough Samoan kids who were a bit older than me, and a little bit further down the path of delinquency. After I met those guys things began to get a little bit out of control. I hadn’t been hanging out with them for long when I started turning up in the dock of the children’s court.
‘I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. I’ve learned.’ Blah blah blah.
It was also then that I started to fight. Stealing was a pretty decent way to gain respect in my South Auckland circles, but the best way to get respect was being able to scrap.
I lost my first fistfight. I can’t remember what it was about, which isn’t surprising because most fights in those days weren’t about much more than a willingness to throw down. I do remember walking away wondering why people made such a big deal out of it, though. There was a little bit of activity; fists flew, I got hit a lot, he didn’t. It probably wasn’t even the worst ass-kicking I’d had that week. When it was all over, I knew I had absolutely nothing to fear from fistfighting.
The circumstances of my second street fight would repeat themselves quite a lot in my life. I was late to the scene of that scrap. Eti was already in a brawl, and was being outgunned by a guy who was a little bit older and a lot larger than him. I ploughed into that fight with open eyes and ready fists. That was a short scrap, that one.
I was barely a teenager then, and less than half the size I am now, but after I’d swung my fist, that guy across from me fell – one punch and he was out cold. Damn, that was a good feeling. There had been a problem, and I was the solution. Good feeling that, great feeling.
Before that I’d been Simi and Eti’s bum boy, going and buying stuff for them, laughing at their jokes, scrounging cigarettes for them and generally being a lower-class friend. After showing my talent with my fists, I became an asset. Every group of young fellas in South Auckland needed someone like me, someone who could do the scrapping, and if it could be a kid, even better. If our kid can fuck you up, then what chance do you have against the rest of us?
It was also with Simi and Eti that I started boosting cars. The first car I stole was a Datsun 180B, and I kept stealing those Dattos for years. The Datto was attractive to the car-buying public in South Auckland for the same reason it was attractive to us kids – it was durable and cheap to run (yeah, we did quite often have to put petrol in our stolen rides). That car also had the added bonus of being easy to jack. Just an elbow into the quarter window, a fork in the ignition and you were away, into the night.
I remember being in that first Datsun, with the boys and one of their uncles – a guy maybe the age I am now – and thinking that I was the coolest motherfucker in all of the North Island. This was some adult shit, and I was smack-bang in the middle of it. I was part of something.
We weren’t involved in commercial car theft – we weren’t selling these cars, stripping them, rebirthing them, nothing like that – this was just about utility, and shits and giggles. I loved it, though. I loved the freedom, the escape and the camaraderie of it all. With a stolen car you could go anywhere you wanted, and with that little bit of illicit electricity running through your veins throughout the trip.
I must have stolen dozens and dozens of cars in my early teens. There was no reason not to. I never thought about the legal shit I could get dumped in and I certainly didn’t give a fuck about the sanctity of someone else’s stuff. I’d never known the pleasure of having any property worth owning then, so I didn’t know what it meant to lose something you cherished.
The cars usually did come back to South Auckland – we did need to get home after all. Sometimes those cars would end up on the side of the road, sometimes in a park, but usually I dumped the cars on the oval of my old school, after having tested how far my ride could fly past the little hump near the rugby pitch.
There were occasions, though, that the cars didn’t come back. One night Johnno and I boosted a couple of cars. Each in our own vehicles, we decided to cruise down to the Otahuhu rugby clubrooms. That night, though, it seemed the stolen-car juice in our veins was running just a little too hot.
I stopped at the traffic lights in the old Corolla shitbox I’d jacked, waiting for Johnno’s Datsun to catch up to me. When I saw the headlights of his vehicle in my rearview mirror, they were coming at an alarming pace. Soon I felt a violent jolt and heard the crunch of metal on metal.
This fuckin’ guy.
When I gathered myself, I looked behind and saw a maniacal grinning face in the car behind me.
Going to be like that is it, bro?
We were racing now. I took off down the street and when Johnno pulled his Datsun alongside, both engines over-revving, I yanked the steering wheel towards him and smashed my ride into his. When he caught up he smashed back, and there we were, barging the shit out of those cars, crashing into each other all the way to Otahuhu, as though it was the end point of some hyper-realistic driving game.
As the cars were hitting each other, I could see sparks in the darkness and heard the scream of side panels colliding. For anyone walking the quiet, dark street
s of South Auckland that night, it would have been quite the spectacle seeing us fly past.
When I saw the slip road to the clubrooms I slowed down, but before I could turn in, Johnno’s Datsun careened into the back of me, smashing me through a fence and into the front yard of a house.
Shortly another link was added to the chain of smashed-up vehicles, when a civilian, surprised by Johnno’s abrupt stop, banged into the back of his Datsun. I ditched my car and ran off to the rugby pitch. From the darkness, I watched the foot race between Johnno and the guys who had smashed into the back of his car.
‘Good luck fella,’ I laughed quietly.
He did have good luck, managing to boost another car that was parked at the clubrooms – a VW Beetle – and race off into the night. Later on the fella who owned the VW figured out that it was my crew who had taken his car. Johnno sent out the word that it was me who’d boosted it. If the guy caught up with me, it’d be on, and Johnno knew that. Better me in a scrap than Johnno, I guess.
I didn’t mind. It was always better to have me in a scrap than any of the other boys. Things were like that in South Auckland then, a patchwork of beefs and resentments which, when the alignment was right, resulted in bursts of violence. It was hard to keep up with it all sometimes. There was more than one occasion when I’d see a bloke and have to go through the old mental Rolodex to see how likely it’d be that he’d be coming over with something swinging towards my head – fists usually, but sometimes a bat or a chain. Grudges could stretch out through generations where I came from, but they could also be happily quashed once the fists flew.
In those early teenage years I first rubbed up against a group of fellas who would keep crossing my path for years. It was supposed to be a pre-arranged fight: because of some long-forgotten slight, Simi would be scrapping against a kid from another school named Siaosi. The agreed terms were that this was going to be a one-on-one affair, with Eti and me there for moral support. When we got to the scrap, though, we found a mob that looked like one of the gangs from the movie The Warriors – literally dozens of fellas, with all kinds of blunt instruments.
Those guys were sick of our shit. We’d put hands on too many of the guys from their school and they weren’t there for a fight, they were there for a lynching. Seeing their numbers and anger, we ran. I would get to put fists on a couple of them many years later, but by then I no longer fought with malice.
That lynch mob had included Samoan brothers Clay and Auckland Auimatagi, who lived nearby and trained at a kickboxing gym run by trainer Lolo Heimuli. The gym boasted a group of Islander kids who would become world-class fighters, with the best of them being another pair of Samoan brothers, Ray and Rony Sefo. Clay, Auckland and Rony would become opponents, rivals and friends; Lolo is one of my current trainers and Ray, well, Ray would make me famous.
At that time, though, I still only fought for fun. While they were training, I was stealing, robbing, mugging and generally running wild. I wasn’t scared of the police and the courts – when they grabbed me, I’d be back out on the streets in no time – and I wasn’t scared of the other guys in the neighbourhood. As far as I was concerned, I’d become untouchable.
I never for a moment thought about injury or death, but in retrospect I guess either of those could have been a possibility. On one occasion when I jacked a car with a few mates in South Auckland, we headed into town, where the mugging spoils were always better. We pulled up in a side street in Newmarket, a busy entertainment and shopping district in central Auckland, and split up into two pairs, with each team heading off to see what we could bring back. I returned with some skinned knuckles and a wallet, waiting for the other fellas to come back. The minutes dragged, until I heard a noise getting louder and louder.
waaaahhhhaAAHGGGRAAAHHHH
It wasn’t a cop’s siren, or a screaming victim, but something else. A mate of mine named Brigham had done the stand-and-deliver on a bloke, who, in turn, had reached into his bag and pulled out a chainsaw. Those boys ran like bloody Leatherface himself was chasing them. While we piled into the car and peeled away, the chainsaw fella was still coming at us. I’m not sure that we stopped laughing all the way back to Papatoetoe.
That stuff was all a laugh to me and nothing more. From the outside it might have looked like I was battling with society, but I wasn’t Chuck D or Tupac Shakur. It wasn’t me against the world, and I wasn’t fighting the power, I was just amusing myself. My real fight was always at home.
You’re probably imagining that my brothers were up to the same kind of nefarious shit that I was getting into then, but that wasn’t the case. Rough and tough as they were, my brothers were both hardworking and conscientious. While I was escaping the house by being a fuck-up and a criminal, John was escaping it by studying and reading, and Steve was playing sports, where he excelled. You probably think that their way was healthier than mine, but if you look at the outcomes, perhaps that’s not the case.
Steve was the first one to break. I guess he must have been the most brittle of us kids, and one day his brain just snapped. It happened after his girl, Donna, broke up with him. Young as I was, I knew it wasn’t her that actually did him in. That break-up was just a straw on the back of a camel that had been laden with a whole childhood of shit.
The first I knew about it was when I got a call from Donna. We didn’t always have a home phone, but we did then, and she called and said that Steve had just walked into her house, silently and with no expression, before sitting down on the couch in front of the television. Donna said that there was no talking to him, and no moving him. He was just sitting there, like a statue, staring at Fair Go, or the news or whatever. That would have been quite the dilemma for anyone: Steve was the biggest and strongest of all of us.
I was still much too young to drive then (although we’ve established that I knew how), but I got in my dad’s car that night and drove over straight away. When I got there, I found a terrified family, and no recognition or focus in Steve’s eyes. Donna said they’d done everything they could to get my brother out of their lounge room, but once I said, ‘Let’s go’ to him, he simply got up and left with me. He had nothing to say to me on the way home. He had nothing much to say to any of us after that, reserving most conversation for the people who lived in his head.
When the old man realised he couldn’t beat the mental out of Steve, he shipped him off to Kingseat Hospital, a grim, pre-war loony bin, which has now been closed as a hospital, but reopened as supposedly the most haunted place in New Zealand. Shortly after he came out of Kingseat, Steve was on the streets: a schizophrenic homeless sixteen-year-old having his own battles every day. I remember seeing him a few months later on the street – shirt off, screaming obscenities, punching himself in the head. I really wished I could have done more for Steve. I couldn’t, though. I was just a kid, and every day I just thought about me. I had to.
When Steve got shipped off, there were only two of us left in the house. A few years after that, there would be none.
Like I said, although I had stopped going to school on weekdays, I still liked getting down there on the weekend, hanging out with the boys and seeing whatever shit we could get into. In one instance, that shit arrived in the form of a pair of nice, shiny Doc Martens shoes, worn by a kid a little older than me, who was hanging out with some of his buddies.
This kid was asking for a robbing, but I saw it as at least a three-man job, and I was down at the school with just my mate Troy. I quickly ran around the friendly houses to see if I could enlist any of my usual co-conspirators, but no one was home. As I ran back to the school, I stopped by my house, where I found John.
John usually looked down on the criminal shit I was into, and I can’t remember what I said to get him to go with me. I probably just told him I needed help. Even though he could get explosively angry with me, John usually tried to help me with whatever if he could.
I was happy to find the kid with the Doc Martens still at the school and, after beating on hi
m a little, I was soon wearing nice, new, snug-fitting Docs. It was a situation I’d been in countless times, but the difference this time was that the shoeless dude went straight to the cops. It wasn’t hard for them to identify John and me, as it turned out the guys we mugged had been in the same year at school as John. John didn’t remember those kids, but they remembered him.
My eyes would generally glaze over when I was dragged to court, only coming alive when it was time for me to offer up my lines of contrition, and a promise to mend my childhood ways. This time, though, there was no space for me to speak, just a barking from the bench.
‘Nine and a half months,’ the magistrate said.
‘Nine and a half months of what?’ I asked.
‘You’re going to prison, son.’
I had a pretty long rap sheet by then, but it was still surprising. I’m not saying I didn’t deserve it – I was a fucking menace, no doubt – but if I’d been busted for car theft, or assault, or kidnapping or almost any other crime, they probably wouldn’t have sent me, a sixteen-year-old kid, into a real, adult jail. Stealing shoes, though, that was the end of civilisation as we knew it. That particular crime was selling papers back then, and formed the crest of a moral panic washing over the whole Western world. Something had to be done about it. Something was done about it. John copped a custodial sentence, too, but a shorter one because he didn’t have the criminal history that his younger brother did. When they took me from the dock I wasn’t scared, nor was I excited. I wasn’t thinking much, just that I was about to find out what jail was like. I don’t know how John felt about being shipped off to prison, because I never talked to him about it. I can imagine he was pretty pissed off, though. While prison was possibly going to be a useful experience in my future as a fuck-up, it wasn’t going to be a useful experience for John who, at that point, had a chance of further education and possibly even a regular life.