Born to Fight Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 thinkthat 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