by Glenn Wood
First Published in 1999 by Shoal Bay Press Limited
Copyright © Gonzoid Limited 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover Design, Photography & Layout Design: Jimi Hunt
ISBN 978 1 74331 383 1
To my long suffering wife Eula and the cadets of the 24th General Poananga cadet wing.
In memory of Sergeant Rodney ‘Jacko’ Edwards.
Contents
1. Police Constable Gonzo
2. The Big Cases
3. Protection Detail
4. The Cadaver and the Spray Can
5. Hospitalised Part One
6. Nazi Feminist Lesbians
7. Die, Pig, Die.
8. Mr Helpful
9. The Tour
10. The Tartan with Green Spots Squad
11. Helpless
12. My Drug Buddy
13. Shootout
14. You Don’t Hit Cops
15. Cop Out
EPILOGUE
Police Constable Gonzo
It was lucky the New Zealand Police didn’t check my employment history before accepting me for training. It would have made pretty hairy reading.
The first of my employment disasters was a part-time job I took while attending school in my home town of New Plymouth. I was employed, very briefly, as a paper boy for the Daily Mail. It was a job destined for failure right from the outset, as I had a somewhat controversial approach to the route plan.
I was going through a short-lived period of political rebellion, having just learnt about communism in Mr Edgely’s mathematics class.
Mr Edgely was a strange little man who used to read us ‘Bridge over the River Kwai’ when he was supposed to be teaching us equations (which led to my having to take ‘technical certificate maths’ in my next school year, or ‘thickie maths’ as it was more commonly known). He also taught us the workings of Stalinism and used to prattle on for ages about how great Gandhi was. Wonderful as the little Indian bloke may have been, this didn’t help me decipher the mysteries of long division.
Anyway, due to my new found Marxist belief, I decided I was going to redress the balance between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ by delivering a paper to everyone in the street, whether they wanted it or not. This bold move was met by a lot of grumbling from miserable old people who hadn’t ordered a paper and bloody well weren’t going to pay for it.
Then of course, there was the equally vocal crowd who had subscribed to the newspaper and didn’t get it because I’d run out before I made it to their houses. I suggested sharing but no-one was listening.
My employers were correspondingly unimpressed with my views and after my steadfast refusal to compromise my political principles; my contract was terminated, thus ending my career as the Robin Hood of paper boys. It seemed the Daily Mail wasn’t yet ready to embrace the classless society.
Nor was I as it turned out. The need to earn money easily surpassed my principles and dragged me back into the bosom of capitalism, where I planned to suck greedily on the nipple of financial prosperity. However, the only job I could get was at a local store called Jim’s Foodtown and the only thing that sucked was my wages.
Jim was a family friend, which is probably the only reason I got the job. He was a hell of a nice bloke and very patient and tolerant. Actually, the guy was a saint, albeit a stingy one. My wages came just below Guatemalan peasant on the pay scale and I had to work extremely hard for the pittance I got. The worst job was delivering sacks of potatoes to Mister Papodopolis’s fish and chip shop. The sacks were heavy and dirty and there were normally twenty or more which I’d lug about on a rickety wooden trolley.
I didn’t think much of Mister Papodopolis. He was skinny, weasel-like and had a stupid, thin, greasy moustache. Plus he always smelt of stale sweat and chip fat. A babe magnet he was not. Aside from these rather obvious drawbacks there was something else off-putting about Mr. P, I couldn’t put my finger on it but he made me feel uncomfortable. Perhaps it was the fact that the miserable jerk never once offered me a cold drink during the two years I delivered his stupid spuds. I had to make do with ‘borrowing’ a bottle or two of lemonade from Jim’s stash out the back. The soft drinks were kept in the same storage area as the spuds so I’m pretty sure Jim knew they’d be illegally drunk.
I like to think he left them there as compensation for the shitty job of spud lugging. If not, sorry about that Jim.
Just when I thought the job at Jim’s couldn’t get more horrendous, it did. Mr. Papodopolis’s brother opened a fish and chip shop as well. Oh goody. Twice the Papodopolis’s, twice the opportunity to rupture myself. I prayed to god they weren’t triplets.
Papodopolis number two looked quite different from number one. He was big and fat and sported a thick beard. I thought he bore a startling resemblance to a goat. Smelt a bit bestial too. But at least his shop was out of rickety trolley pushing distance. Instead it was within rickety delivery van driving distance, which meant carrying the spuds to the van, loading them and then hauling them out again at the other end. Then, just to prove he was an even bigger dog’s butt than his brother, Papodopolis number two made me drag those hateful sacks down two flights of dark and dingy stairs to the basement, where he’d decided to store them. After damn near breaking my neck trying to negotiate the steps with the first sack I figured out a better method. I put the sack on the top step then gave it a vicious kick and let it bounce to the bottom. Much easier.
I was careful not to use the boot method when P number two was about and had to chuckle when I heard him complaining to Jim that he seemed to get more squashed and bruised potatoes per bag than his brother. I suggested that he should offer mashed spud rather than chips with his fish. He glared at me and muttered something in Greek. I think it may have been a curse because ever since that day I’ve never got on with goats. Coincidence? I think not.
A string of equally dismal jobs including rag bag collecting and camp leader at YMCA youth camps (fun, but below ‘drunken tramp’ on the pay scale) completed my pre-police curriculum vitae. Fortunately the boys in blue weren’t looking for budding entrepreneurs, they wanted big, fit, honest and keen. I was all those things and was accepted for cadet training at Trentham Police College on the 22 January 1980. I had just turned eighteen.
The course was one year long and extremely hard, as anyone who has read my first book will attest. The police instructors (or miserable bastards as they were commonly known) pushed us to our physical and mental limits and several cadets cracked under the strain. But we were taught the rudiments of policing, and given just enough knowledge and experience to struggle through our first few months as real policemen.
Once I’d completed training I applied to be posted to Palmerston North, a large (by New Zealand standards) student town situated in the lower North Island. I wished to be based there for one reason, and one reason alone. Women. Or more particularly a woman. Her name was Carey and we were in love. Carey was a student at Palmerston North Teachers College, as were a lot of my friends at the time. We had met two years previously in New Plymouth and had carried on a long distance romance while I was training. I was keen to be romantic from a much, much, closer perspective and was over the moon when my request for placement was granted.
I began work at Palmerston North Po
lice Station (est. 22/12/1871) on 1 January 1981, mad keen to begin my long and illustrious career in the New Zealand Police.
I knew the job wouldn’t be easy but I was young and full of the sort of blind confidence possessed only by those who haven't the slightest inkling of what they are in for.
My unwavering self-belief was made even more incomprehensible by the unbelievable incompetence I’d displayed during my life thus far. Even my closest friends and family referred to me as a jinx. I had a reputation for disaster that surpassed belief and had thoroughly earned my nickname of Gonzo.
The first one to experience my disposition for disaster was my new found room-mate Warren. No-one who knew me at that time will remember me flatting with a ‘Warren’ because he was seldom called by his given name. Everyone knew him as Sheep, mainly because of his curly white hair and beard but also because of his tendency to baaa. He was a baker by trade which was convenient for both of us. It meant we worked similar hours and shared a lot of the same down time. It also meant we had copious quantities of pies and sausage rolls in the freezer, allowing me to continue the culinary tradition of eating crap I’d begun in Trentham.
We’d only been rooming together for a few weeks when I decided our place of residence was looking a bit bare and needed decorating. I searched high and low for something that might brighten up the house and quickly came to the conclusion that, unless you counted Sheep’s beer can collection, we owned nothing even remotely ornamental.
However, I did come across something interesting during my hunt. It was a box of items I’d ‘borrowed’ from training college. At the bottom of the box was an item I’d retrieved from a tear gas demonstration our instructors had inflicted on us during weapons training. It was a spent tear gas canister. I had retrieved the canister after the exercise because it looked like a rocket and was sort of cool. I then smuggled the empty shell out of Trentham under my text books. As you do.
In the absence of any other options I decided this was exactly the sort of adornment our living room needed. I mean how many houses could boast a real live tear gas bomb poised over the fireplace? Excellent. Students hung stolen STOP signs on their walls, so it stood to reason that a police/baker house should be decorated with a lethal weapon, and perhaps a few sausage rolls.
Once Sheep recognised the coolness factor of the rocket he agreed to help me put it up.
We decided the best way to rig it would be to run string through the holes in the body of the canister then hang it from the roof. There were four holes in the rocket, two at the front and two at the back. The purpose of the holes was to allow the tear gas to escape once the bomb had been fired. Rigging up the rear holes was easy and we quickly threaded them. I climbed a small step ladder to hang the bomb from several strategically placed thumb tacks. Now all we had to do was run string through the front holes and our masterpiece would be complete.
This wasn’t as simple as it first seemed. There was still a rubber plug jammed in the front left hole. It was stuck fast and I decided the best way to remove it was with a turkey skewer. Sheep grabbed the required implement from the kitchen and passed it to me. His job was to hold the ladder steady so I could poke the skewer into the tear gas container as it dangled from the ceiling. Sheep was most encouraging from what he (wrongly) thought was a position of safety and he offered me helpful poking advice. After a few minutes fiddling around with the skewer I lost patience and gave the plug an almighty stab. It worked and the plug burst free, unfortunately so did all of the tear gas that hadn’t been released when the bomb exploded. Somehow a pocket of deadly toxins had remained trapped inside the canister all those months. Go figure.
Now it was free to burst all over Sheep and myself. Which it did, burning into our skin and eyes with an intensity that was beyond belief. Sheep ran howling into the bathroom and plunged his head under the taps in a vain attempt to wash away the searing pain. He took off so quickly that I didn’t have time to tell him that water made the gas burn more fiercely. Judging from the screams coming from the bathroom he had discovered this for himself. I wasn’t sympathetic as, in his haste to look after number one, he’d abandoned his post and left me gassed and blinded up a ladder. Fortunately I was a highly trained professional and knew exactly what to do in a situation such as this. I fell off the ladder onto the lounge floor. Then I lay in a foetal position on the carpet till the pain stopped. It wasn’t pretty but at least I wasn’t in the bathroom trying to remove my eyes with toilet paper.
The next day, we very gingerly removed the bomb and put it back in my box. Its place above the fireplace was taken by a beer can. It wasn’t as spectacular as the rocket but it was a very nice beer can and it never gassed us.
I have improved slightly in the gullibility stakes as I’ve aged but probably nowhere near as much as I should have. I still make the same mistakes I’ve always made but am better at covering my tracks now. I also have a level-headed wife to guide me around life’s pitfalls. This is probably the best advice I could give to anyone who suffers from excessive Gonzoness. Marry someone sensible.
Sometimes even this isn’t enough. Case in point. I’m writing this current section while under the influence of pain killing drugs. I need these because I have recently suffered a shoulder injury brought about by my belief that I am still in my teens and can indulge in any activity I like without warming up first. I am also stuck at home at present because the car I purchased just two weeks ago is at the panel beaters because I drove it into a wall last weekend. But the truly frightening thing is that even including my current disastrous streak, I’m much more sensible now than I was when I was in the Police. My clumsiness, poor judgment and misfortune were at their zenith back then, both in my home life and at work.
My first few months in the Palmerston North Police were made up of a constant stream of nasty surprises. I discovered that the camaraderie I’d experienced while training didn’t exist in the world of 'real’ policing. Well, not in my section anyway. Sure, there was a common bond but it was considerably weakened by political in-fighting and an age gap. At Trentham we were all young and keen; now I was working with cops who were old and bitter. Not a good combination. I also realised that the real criminals I was now dealing with were much nastier than the pretend offenders we arrested when in training. Suddenly I was dealing with real scum, people who had no respect for the police and wouldn’t think twice about calling you a pig and spitting in your face.
Another discovery that came as a shock was that I hadn’t finished studying yet. In fact all the classroom work I had done at Trentham was just a precursor to the extension studies I was expected to take as a probationary constable. This continuing education came in the form of units, which consisted of photocopied sheets of information, case law, legalities, police procedure and question and answer tests. Basically a ‘how to’ guide on modern policing methods. There were twenty one units in all and you had to pass every one of them before you could receive your permanent appointment as a police officer. According to the memo that accompanied these units the aim of the course was to ‘help policemen to acquire the attitudes, knowledge, skills and experience needed to fulfil their role effectively’.
A pass mark of eighty per cent was required on every unit and all twenty one had to be completed within seventeen months of your starting date. To add to the pressure, the first unit was accompanied by a threatening letter that stated that ‘those students who do not apply themselves energetically, co-operatively and/or fail a unit test three times will have their overall position in the police reviewed’.
As if that weren’t enough, the units were all written in ‘police speak’, which means using the most confusing and difficult language possible. Take these following examples.
A calendar month ends at midnight on the day in the ensuing month immediately preceding the day numerically corresponding to the commencing day.
‘Person’ includes a corporate sole and also a body of persons whether corporate or unincorporated.
Got that?
My final unpleasant discovery was that my sergeant of the first few months was not very good. He’d been in the job for a long time and his heart wasn’t in it anymore. I think he was waiting to retire which meant he spent most of his time avoiding trouble. This placed additional stress on the other members of my section, keeping them on edge and ensuring that no-one had any time to teach me anything.
There were a lot of aspects to the job that I really enjoyed but I was finding it much more difficult than I imagined. I couldn’t talk to my friends or girlfriend about what I was experiencing because no matter how hard they tried they couldn’t understand what my job was like. My friends were mainly students and their biggest worry was that one of their lecturers made them work for three hours without a coffee break. Oh my God!
No, the only person who would understand my trials and tribulations would be another new cop. I decided to phone my best friend from police training college. His name was Phil and he had been posted to Christchurch in the South Island.
It was a most uplifting phone call. He said he had spoken to a number of cadets who were finding it hard going, himself included. Apparently my Gonzoisms were minor compared to the misfortunes of some ex cadets. He couldn’t wait to tell me about one in particular.
The story concerned a cadet that Phil and I had despised at Trentham. We’ll refer to him just as Phil’s room-mate because that’s what he was. The guy was the most weasel-like man I’ve ever known and that’s saying something considering I’ve been working in the advertising industry for the past eight years. I disliked the guy from day one and the longer I knew him the more I detested him. He was more of a nuisance than a rat in a drainpipe shop. Even writing about him gives me the hump.