Kiwiville Pt. 2

This carries on from an earlier post.  Might be an idea to have read that before reading this.  OK…

ARRIVAL AND ADJUSTMENT, LIFE AS AN EXPAT

It took some adjustment, as you can imagine.  It was my first time abroad for any length of time.  A couple of hours here and there in Tijuana hardly counted at all; I didn’t even need a passport for that.

My first couple of weeks at Craig’s house was nothing.  It was still Christmas season and he was doing some running around with his family and fiancée.  In fact, he ended up just leaving me at his house in some out-of-the-way suburb in Hamilton, and I had absolutely idea how far I was from town or in what direction, nor did I have contacts to get in touch with anybody.

After a few days, this guy pulled up in a 70s Holden muscle car, said his name was Rick (he turned out to be Rik Bernards, more on him in a minute).  He said that Craig had told him about me, and he’d just come by to see how I was doing and invite me to a New Years party at this club called Zak’s, if memory serves.

When the night came, Rik showed up to pick me up and we went to the party/show.  What immediately struck me was how Rik walked around acting like a rock star, but somehow it didn’t seem obnoxious to anyone.  Well, it would later turn out that he WAS (is still, I guess) a rock star, at least locally, as a founding member of the well-loved band Knightshade.  I’d never heard of them, but at least at that time, they were a pretty well-known band in New Zealand and Australia.  That certainly explained it.

Everyone was so nice to me that night, and pretty much the entire time I was there.  As an American, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.  It took me months of living there to realize there was no other shoe.  People there are just that nice and friendly.  No reason not to be, I guess, it was just outside of my experience up to that time.  These people didn’t know me.

Well, Rik was friends of the band playing that night, Paul Martin and the Pink Torpedoes or something like that, a hard rock cover band.  Paul turned out to be a bandmate of Rik’s in Knightshade and even more friendly than Rik was if that was possible. 

Talking to Paul, it came out that his drummer from that band (which actually got a lot of work, Paul also being a well-known radio disc Jockey) was losing its drummer, who was also a flatmate of Paul’s.  So there was an opening for a drummer in a working band with a small tour already booked, and a fairly permanent place to live, a small room in a house with Paul, his brother Dino and one other flatmate, the towering and intimidating Matt, who worked as a roadie for touring bands (such as AC/DC, Metallica, etc.). All three very kiwi-friendly…uh, that is, friendly in the Kiwi way, not friendly to kiwis.  OK, anyway, instead of making a novel of this, which is a poorly remembered time in any case, here are a few snapshots that were pretty funny/interesting:

• The first time I answered the phone at the house, the woman at the other end insisted that I was Dino, putting on an accent. “No one talks like that, Dino!” she admonished. “You sound like you’re on Baywatch!” They got a lot of American TV there and Baywatch was huge. I would meet that woman later that evening and she was really embarrassed.
• I once overheard Matt’s girlfriend and Paul talking quietly about Matt having “masbah” or “a masbah” or something like that. It wasn’t my conversation but I liked Matt and was a little concerned. “I’m sorry,” I butted in, “but is Matt OK? What’s a masbah?”  “Oh, excuse me, I didn’t know I had an American audience,” Julie spat sarcastically. “He has a MARRRZZZ BARRR.” Whoops.
• I encountered my first black-sand beach in Ragland. I just walked right onto the sand, barefoot. In the summer. Jesus that hurt.
• Over 4th of July weekend, when I realized that this wasn’t a holiday there (remember, it was my first time outside the U.S.), I got in my car and found my way to the most remote place accessible by car that  I could find on the North Island.  I wound up in a small town called Whangamōmona (https://whangamomonahotel.co.nz/  if you click that link and see the picture, I want to point out that this place looks like it might be a hell of a lot more accessible now than it was in the winter of 1992).  They were every bit as friendly and accommodating as Hamiltonians were – seems to be all of New Zealand, or at least most of it, circa 1992. My plan was to stay in a room at the pub. It WAS a proper pub, as in an old-fashioned public house, a place you go to drink and, if you drink too much, you pay a bit for a room upstairs to sleep it off. That was my very looked-forward-to plan, but it didn’t happen. I had befriended a very nice couple, a sheep farmer and his wife, and when it was time to end the evening, nothing would do but I go back to their home and sleep on their sofa. “We can’t just leave you in a pub, mate,” the man said, and his wife whole-heartedly agreed. I couldn’t tell them that it was sort of a cultural experience I was looking for, staying in a proper pub. No, I don’t mean that I couldn’t emotionally bring myself to say that to them (though that was probably true as well), but that I wasn’t physically or mentally able to put those words together after having drunk as much as I had. Oh, entirely by the way, that was the evening when I learned of the Kiwi rule that states that if you lose a game of eight-ball with every one of your balls on the table, you have to stand on top of the pool table and show everyone your REAL balls. Nice.
• I used to meet some famous musicians there, due to Paul having a rock radio show that would have in-studio interviews.  Jason Newsted even once came over for “tea” (dinner).
• Then there was the time that a band whose name I can’t recall asked me to sit in for a gig they were slated to play.  It was a party thrown by a biker gang called, I think, The Outlaws or something.  The band’s regular drummer was a Maori guy, and he was afraid that he might get his ass kicked by the gang, if not outright murdered – they were reputed to be pretty racist.  I accepted the gig once I got the drummer’s blessing.  Should we have turned it down?  Feel free to judge me by modern standards if you want, and I admit to having had some moral question about it myself, but in the end, we were all skint, and racist money spends the same as any other.  Yes, that Maori drummer would have got his ass kicked at the very least.  It was easily the scariest gig I had ever played.  The gang wouldn’t let us leave at the agreed-upon time.  They kept getting drunker and drunker, taking more and more drugs and freely giving us guys in the band booze and drugs as well, and we dared not say no.  We were scared, getting severely messed up, but still forced to continue playing.  About an hour or so after sunrise (or more, who could know at that point), they were done, tired, and made us leave, and we did, all of us very disappointed that we hadn’t even got paid.  We were just relieved to get out of there with our lives…..until the band leader told us that he had, in the end, gotten paid.  He came up and gave us each $1000 – five times more than we had agreed to.  Well, OK, then.  I wouldn’t do it again, but we came out ahead, anyway.

That’s just a few samples of the things that stand out in my memory.  In all cases, it was an auspicious start to an expat “career”.

Now, in the spirit of this website, I want to point out that, though I got to do, see, and experience a lot of things that many people might consider exciting and exotic (and yeah, I can’t argue with that, really), the point is, there are different ways to find your way outside of your own country.  

That’s not necessarily meant as encouragement.  You have to be able to live with and get used to constant insecurity if you don’t have enough money to pay for the privilege of staying wherever you find yourself.  I’ve lived with that insecurity for most of my life now, and it’s just part of life.  I hardly think about it.  If you can’t do that and you’re not rich, you may not want to be an expat.

A lot of sites and YouTube videos suggest that teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) might be a good path, and it might.  I don’t know whether it still is or not.  I didn’t start off that way.  I left the U.S. in 1991, years before I’d even heard of that route, but by the end of 1996 I was on that path, and glad of it.  

One thing I have to point out though.  Most of my colleagues found teaching to be difficult and demanding for far too little money.  I couldn’t argue with them, but I was coming from a much different perspective.  I saw it as regular and legal and ethical money that afforded me a life where I wasn’t constantly worried about the prospect of running out of it.  It’s all about perspective.

Yes, I’ve described my life in New Zealand briefly but accurately, and it all happened while, and in many cases because, I was skint.  So there’s that.

Thanks for reading.

• I have another cartoon video almost finished.  Stay tuned…