The name’s Haumie, but everyone calls me Homie. I’m not really a homie – that’s just what my nan called me and it stuck.
My story is pretty typical, I think. Well, typical for me and the people that I grew up with, anyway.
I was born in the Hawke’s Bay, on the west side of Flaxmere, the side that not even the people that live there want to be in. They stopped delivering pizzas to our side of town because the pizza man got robbed too often, and since that Asian pizza delivery guy got killed up in Auckland, they just didn’t think it was worth the risk. I think that was pretty much how all of New Zealand thought of us, not really worth the trouble. I’m pretty sure they thought that if they ignored us for long enough, we would disappear – “out of sight, out of mind” sort of thing.
We lived down a short dead-end street, with a small island thing at the end of it. We stayed in a three-bedroom flat that was part of a two-storey government housing complex with my uncle and aunty and their four kids. Us kids were always playing on the street, pretending to drive the broken-down cars to all the cool places we saw on TV. I used to like playing with the dogs and cats that roamed the streets, and playing league with the other kids down at the island. No shoes, dirty clothes and snotty noses, but we didn’t care – as long as we had each other, everything was all good.
I was six when Dad left. Skye my sister wasn’t born yet. I don’t know what happened. No one does – he was here one day and gone the next, and no one wants to ask.
I tried to ask one day. I was sitting with my mum while she was drinking with some of my family. She was drunk and singing, so I figured it was a good time to ask because she was happy. She started sad crying, then angry crying, and then she turned on me, pulling me out the door by my hair, punching me over and over again. At first, it was upper cuts. Then I started to block them, so she started on the back of my head. She threw me onto the lawn and kicked me, before locking me outside, bleeding and freezing. I tried to go round to my friend Jake’s house, but his mum wouldn’t let me in. Who knows why? Perhaps she thought I deserved it or just didn’t want the drama. So I went back home and sat on the step. No one bothered to help me. Maybe they all thought the same thing as the rest of the world – not worth the trouble. My uncle threw me a blanket as he stumbled to the car and said, “It will be alright, boy. She’s just drunk. Just go to sleep here, and she will sober up in the morning and everything will be okay. You’ll see.” I guess that was his bullshit attempt at trying to help me and make me feel better. Apart from that, everyone just left me there on the doorstep covered in blood, cold and wrapped in a shitty blanket that my uncle found lying around somewhere.
Mum started on a fast-and-steady decline not long after Dad left, so newly born Skye and I moved in with Nan. It was good there. I remember late nights with my cousins, playing Nintendo, fighting and crying over whose turn it was or who was taking too long. I’ll never forget Nan’s fried eggs, deep-fried in butter – they were so good. In fact, everything was fried in butter, and everything tasted good.
She tried her best but couldn’t handle or afford a new baby and a young kid, so not long after that I went back to Mum’s. Even though I was only six, I understood that it was me or my sister, so I had to go. I didn’t like it, but I understood it. I didn’t even cry. I wanted to, but I didn’t. And going back to Mum’s didn’t seem so bad, as I had friends there. Nan cried and said sorry a lot when I left, but I stayed tough. I just walked away. I knew one day I would be back, and I could visit heaps, so it was just temporary.
Mum’s drinking was worse. She still smoked weed (if someone else was paying), and now she dabbled in the occasional round of Class A. A bit of meth every now and then to numb the pain, but alcohol was her drug of choice. It was cheap and everywhere. Kevin, the Indian guy who owned the liquor store, used to let me get cigarettes and alcohol for Mum, as long as I had a note from her. It was cool though, because there would usually be some change and the Street Fighter machine was only forty cents. So Jake and I would go down and get Mum’s beer and play the game, until one of the bigger kids came and stood over us saying “Seconds bey”, which meant he wanted to take your next turn, and if he was enough of a dick, he wasn’t planning on giving it back. We knew the rules so didn’t bother arguing and would just head home.
It was a tough way to grow up, but not every day was hard. I had a lot of friends, and I had tea at Jake’s most nights, unless I was staying at Nan’s. I enjoyed growing up on the cul-de-sac. There was a boy’s home on the corner, so there were always new kids coming and going. Some used to pick on us, but we learnt how to avoid and get away from them. The home always had fun new things, and a huge trampoline, huge games room and massive grounds. The foster family there didn’t mind us playing over and usually had snacks for the neighbourhood kids.
There were always parties at our house, so my uncles, aunties and cousins were always there. My cousin Paora used to come over and drink with them and would always bring his skateboard. It had half the tail broken off, and the trucks and wheels had seen better days, but I skated that thing up and down the driveway for as long as I could stay awake. Paora would stumble off the couch in the morning, and I would sneak in one more trick before he could take it off me and skate home. I learnt all the basics – ollies, kick flips, heel flips, all that stuff. I stole a piece of old rail that was on the side of the train track, set it up on the side of the kerb and taught myself to grind along it. Paora finally got himself a new board and let me have his old one, which by that time was pretty much unusable, but I still skated it like it was the flashest thing out.
I was about 11 then and had just started intermediate, but all I wanted to do was skate. I went to the skatepark every day and night. The school would ring Mum every second day to tell her I wasn’t at school, but she didn’t really care where I was, so I would stay down at the park as long as I wanted, going home just to sleep.
I started stealing clothes from the clothing bin by the skatepark. Jake would lift me into the big chute and push me in. Then I would throw bags of clothes out, and he’d pull me back out and we’d go through them. There was some good shit in there. We had some of the best clothes on the street. Jake was a couple of years older than me and had started hanging out with some of the older gang kids and getting into all that sort of stuff – fighting, shoplifting, burglary. We still hung out, but not often. All I wanted to do was skate. All my friends from the street did pretty much the same thing as Jake, just different gangs, but I was married to skateboarding and that’s all I wanted to do.
Around five every day, I would leave the skatepark and skate down to the back of the bakery. The owner would throw the day’s leftovers into big plastic bags and then into the bins. I would jump the back fence, dive in and grab all the cakes, sandwiches and pies that were wrapped in plastic or paper and chuck them into my bag. I’d skate to Nan’s and give Skye and her some cakes. Nan didn’t ask where I got them from. I think she just guessed I stole them and would prefer not to know. She would kill me if she knew I got them out of a rubbish bin. I’d go back to the skatepark till I needed to sleep, then head home. Mum would usually be drunk and mumble something as I walked in the door, but I had stopped caring what she thought and said a long time ago, so would just go straight to bed.
I didn’t have many friends down at the skatepark. I was quiet, had second-hand clothes and ate food I’d stolen out of a rubbish bin, so I wasn’t the coolest kid there. But I didn’t care. I’d learnt to be happy by myself a long time ago. I guess happy is the wrong word, content enough is probably better. At 12, I was one of the youngest ones down there and didn’t drink or smoke. So to a lot of them, I was probably too young, seemed a bit odd and was not the kind of person they wanted to talk to. I got to see Nan and Skye every day, my belly was full, I had a bed and I had my skateboard – I didn’t really need anything or anyone.
I was down at the park at the end of a long skate session, and she literally skated into my life. She wasn’t like all of the other white kids I’d met that were either too good for me or exactly like me. She was from the other, richer side of town, but she still had a bit of roughness about her. She had shoulder-length, light-brown, scruffy hair that she usually wore tied back, and she had these beautiful green eyes that you could get lost in. She usually wore knee-length cut-off denim shorts, those girly skate tees or a singlet that she had scored off her dad, and a hoody if it was cold enough.
She was that sort of hippy-type pretty that just happened, not your traditional model- or movie-star-type pretty that had to be all made up and took work, that natural beauty that was a bit rough around the edges.
She had been coming down to the park for a few months before we spoke or even acknowledged each other. I’d noticed her, but I didn’t think she noticed me. Then I skated past her one day, and she looked at me. And we did that head nod and raise the eyebrows thing, and she said, “Hey.” I thought of all the millions of things I could say back. “Hey, how’s it going?” was all that came out. “Good. How about you?” she replied. Stoked as, just to be talking to her, I replied, “Good as. The name’s Haumie, but everyone calls me Homie.” That was a lie – only my 68-year-old grandmother called me that; no one else really called me anything anymore. “Emma,” she replied. She said, “You’re pretty good. We should skate together sometime.” I said, “Sure,” and skated away. Knob, I thought, as I skated away from the skatepark. That was the golden opportunity and I blew it. I got to talk to her, but none of that went the way I had planned or imagined in my head. Then it dawned on me that she knew my name, she had smiled (and not because I was making her feel a bit weird or uncomfortable) and she wanted to skate with me.
For two weeks solid, I skated down at the park day and night, afraid to leave, in case she came and left while I was gone.
Then she finally turned up, and I pretended not to notice her. She came up to grind the rail I was sitting next to and fell over right in front of me, and instead of doing the gentlemanly thing, I laughed. She laughed with me and told me to shut up, then asked if I wanted to go skate down at a nearby drain. I thought I had skated every spot in Flaxmere but had never heard of any drain. “Sure,” I said, and we wandered off. We got to the racecourse just down the road, jumped the fence and headed off through the bushes. We came to a big, old, empty concrete drain. It was about 20 metres wide, with sloped sides that smoothed off into a flat section. She had set up some old rails, and there was a massive concrete block in the middle that you could ollie onto or grind. Why had I never been here, and how did no one know about this?
Even though I had liked her more than I would ever tell her before I even knew her name, taking me to a secret skate spot made her perfect.
There wasn’t much talking. We skated and laughed for hours until we couldn’t skate anymore.
She came over and sat next to me and said, “We should go – it’s getting pretty dark.” “For sure,” I said, as we sat watching the sun fade away behind these massive clouds of industrial smoke, bellowing into the air from the factories a couple of kilometres away. There was no awkwardness. We just sat silent, both exhausted from our skate. It had been the best skate of my life. And then it happened. She leaned in and sort of shoulder bumped me, and we turned and smiled at each other. I hadn’t had much experience with girls, and everything in me was saying kiss her, but I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing to do. A mixture of exhilaration and panic set in. Confused and excited, I sat there smiling. Then said, “That was an awesome skate. Cheers for bringing me here.” She smiled back and said, “Yeah it was. No worries, it’s ours to skate.” Our secret little bit of paradise, somewhere to run away from the shithole that surrounds us. As we both turned to look back towards the factory smoke, I moved in a little closer and just started talking. I’m not sure why, but words just started coming out of my mouth as quick as I could think them. “You’re the most perfect person I have ever met and everything inside me is saying to kiss you, but then the realistic side of my brain wonders why someone as perfect as you is even talking to me, and there’s no way you would want to kiss someone like me. So I don’t.” Before I could say anything completely stupid, she interrupted me and told me that I should try and see what happened. She turned around and I leaned in to kiss her. She pulled back and said it probably wasn’t a good idea, then laughed. She told me to try again and we kissed for what seemed like forever. It felt right and exactly where I should be, nowhere else, just right here, right now, and everything was as it should be. It really was our own little bit of paradise.
We sat there for a while, and then grabbed our boards and took off to the skatepark to get her car. She asked if I wanted a ride home, but I said no. There was no way I wanted her to see where I lived. She kissed me again and took off. Even though I would usually stay and skate, I took off too.
I got to Jake’s and all his gangster mates where there, so I just said “Hey” and skated off to Nan’s. I had tea at Nan’s and crashed on the couch, the happiest I had gone to sleep in a long long time.
Em convinced me to start skating in competitions with her. I started winning. I’d get clothes, decks, trucks, everything I needed to skate really, and I was getting it all for free. Before that, I had managed to get a second-hand deck and scab parts from different places. I had stolen money from Mum, and Nan had given me a little bit. I had had a pretty good second-hand set up, but I had been skating with it for a while, and it was good to get brand-new gear. I no longer used it, but I still had the deck that Paora had given me six years earlier. It was the best present anyone had ever given me, and I planned on keeping it forever.
She introduced me to her dad Blake, who owned a skate shop. I didn’t mind that she pretended we were just friends. Even though he was a real good guy, people like him don’t want people like me, from my side of town, to be with their daughters. He said, as long as I kept entering and winning skate comps, he would sponsor me and give me a job. The only catch was I had to start back at school. He offered to pay my fees, so I agreed. Truth is, if Em hadn’t gone to the same school, I probably would have said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
It was good being back at school. I was a bit behind everyone else though, and I’m sure everyone laughed at me. I was used to just sort of fading into the background, but it was hard to go unnoticed when you’re the oldest in the class by a couple of years. But I didn’t mind. I used to jump the fence at lunch and interval, and head down to the skatepark for a quick skate and then to the skate shop for a feed.
I introduced Em to my nan and Skye, and they really liked her. When I first introduced them, Nan said, “How does such a pretty girl like you end up with a terrible-looking bugger like him?”, and we all cracked up. Em started teaching Skye how to skate. I was so stoked that she wanted to learn. Skateboarding had literally saved my life. If it wasn’t for skating, I probably would have joined Jake and ended up in a gang, hustling and robbing people. Everything good in my life came because of skateboarding.
I’d been sleeping on Nan’s couch pretty much every night for ages, except for when I would sneak over to Em’s. My mum either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care that I hadn’t been home or seen her for almost a year. She used to show up every now and then at Nan’s when I wasn’t home. Pretending to visit, she would always ask Nan for money before she left, and take home an armful of food, and Nan being Nan would always give it to her. I knew she had been, because the cupboard would be nearly empty and Nan had no money left to buy food. I hated my mum so much, and she didn’t even care. I often wondered if there was a god and what I did to deserve her for a mother. I can honestly say I didn’t care what happened to her. I didn’t even care enough to hate her. Indifference is worse, I think.
I didn’t get paid much, but I gave most of my wages to Nan. It was all good though – I didn’t need anything. I got given all of my skate stuff and clothes, and the fridge at the shop was always full. I don’t eat much, so Blake didn’t mind me eating there even if I wasn’t working. If I wasn’t at school or skating, I was usually down at the shop, working or kicking back with Em. I think Blake started to catch on that we were more than just friends, but he didn’t say anything. I was working and skating, and I was so so in love – it felt amazing. Everything was perfect.
Then it all fell apart. Jake came running into the shop one night, drunk and hysterical and maybe on something – I would never know. His head was cut and covered in blood. He was crying and saying, “I’m sorry bro, I’m so sorry,” over and over again.
I must have asked him a million times what was wrong, but he didn’t say anything comprehendible, just mumbled and cried. He dragged me into a car with a couple of his other mates, who just sat there, quiet and very nervous. I asked them what was going on. K, one of the passengers, looked at me and said, “You’ll see brother.” The driver glimpsed back every now and then in the rear-view mirror but avoided making eye contact. By now, I knew something was really wrong but couldn’t figure out what it was.
We got to the skatepark, and Em was lying on the ground surrounded by medics. She was hysterical, scared I guess, and bleeding from everywhere. Her skateboard lay broken a few metres from her. I knew she had taken Skye for a skate, but I couldn’t see Skye anywhere.
Before I could get out, the police surrounded the car, smashed all the windows and pepper-sprayed all of us, before dragging us out onto the road. That was when I noticed that the front of the car was caved in and it had blood all over the bonnet.
I was confused and panicking – I couldn’t believe what was happening right in front of me. The cops figured out that I wasn’t part of the group and took me over to Em, who had calmed down but was still in shock and unsure of what was going on. I asked her over and over again where Skye was, but she didn’t know, so it was a waste of time. I got up and looked everywhere, but couldn’t see her. I thought maybe she had gone home earlier, and Em had stayed on to skate. I hoped but knew that Em wouldn’t let Skye take off by herself.
The horrible feeling that something wasn’t right churned inside my stomach and literally made me feel sick. I asked the police where she was, and they told me what happened. Jake, K and two other guys I didn’t know were drunk and stoned and had stolen the car they were in. Jake was driving when a cop decided to pull them over. They did a runner and had been driving around the streets of Flaxmere for 30 minutes, before they lost control coming round the bend and drove straight into Em and Skye. The cop that was chasing stayed to help the girls, and Jake kept driving.
Tears started streaming down my face, and I started to look frantically for Skye again, before the cop put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Sorry mate, the ambos did everything they could, but the young one didn’t make it. She’s in the ambulance.” I walked over to the ambulance. I didn’t want to look. I was already a mess, but anxiety took over my body. Sweat poured down my whole body, as I paced past the ambulance over and over again, looking at the ground with my hands in my head. I looked at her lifeless, blood-covered body. She didn’t look dead, she just looked dirty and asleep. I tried to step into the ambulance, but couldn’t. I yelled at her to wake up, and then started shaking her foot from outside the ambulance. But I knew deep down that she wasn’t asleep.
I looked over at Jake handcuffed in the cop car. He was looking at the ground crying. I wasn’t sure why he was crying and didn’t really care. I looked over at the stolen car, and there was a knife sitting on the backseat. I walked over, picked it up, opened the door to the police car and stabbed him in the throat. He gurgled a lot, and I kept stabbing. I managed to stab him 12 times before the police stopped me. Em tried to run over, but a cop grabbed her. He was dead instantly. An eye for an eye didn’t make me feel better, it just meant more dead people. I stopped crying while the police handcuffed me. I didn’t feel better or worse, I didn’t really feel anything – no emotion, just numbness, dead inside.
I hadn’t believed people when they said in times of crisis or shock, your life flashes before your eyes, but it did. Everything was perfect, and in a few minutes everything that was wrong with my life and everything that was right with my life had collided, and it was all ruined. I realised I had spent my whole life denying and hiding from who I was, but it was always inside me. I was exactly what everyone had expected me to be, and I was where everyone expected me to be, sitting in a police car looking at a few years in prison.