Born to Fight Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 petrolin 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, butusually 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’