Where I grew up, there were two ways to make big money: farming pigs for the corporate machine or running drugs over the border for the gangs. I lost friends to those gangs.
My life began on a Quebec farm a few kilometres from the US border. That farm was the realisation of my father’s lifelong dream to become a dairy farmer. A dream realised four years before I was born and which turned into nightmare when I was a baby.
The outbreak of Cattle Brucellosis in Quebec would see my father’s entire herd slaughtered and our farm, along with many others, barred from having dairy cattle on them for years.
It was the beginning of the perfect storm. Growing political discontent among Quebec’s French majority would boil over and start an exodus of the English minority, bringing depression to our local economy along with a huge drop in real-estate values. My parents had no option but to stay. Their farm was worth less than the mortgage and leaving would mean bankruptcy. By the time I left high school many years later, unemployment was 15%, and for the young more like 50%.
Through my father’s persistence an economic solution arrived. We became a feeder operation, breeding and raising piglets who were shipped off at thirty pounds to fatting barns the size of airplane hangars, then to the kill-floor for export to Asia. It was still not enough. My parents had to work full-time jobs outside of the farm to make ends meet, so my brother and I worked the farm. My childhood was a combination of hard work and loneliness. By 10 I could drive a tractor, use a chainsaw, and shoot a high-powered rifle. When I wasn’t working I’d play alone in the abandoned houses around my father’s farm, making up stories about the people who had once lived there.
I craved human company and hated the cruelty of farming. It drove my father nuts and it didn’t help that we were emotional opposites. He was always trying not to feel, while all I wanted was to feel anything other than corporal punishment and desperation. Like many in New Zealand of that time, my father believed the best way to deal with emotion was to harden up. His attempts to train me in that skill only made it worse. I was curious about everything, scared of nothing, and openly rebellious.
I also loved to write and won a short story competition when I was 12. A story about an orphan calf my grandfather gave me to raise. It was picked out of hundreds of stories and the judges commented, “It’s emotional connection made the story stand out.”
For that I won $100, got a certificate, and got beaten up in the school yard the next day. I was on the ground getting kicked and being told, “Only fags and sissies write stories. Which one are you?”
A year later I returned that kid’s favour. Over that summer holiday I grew into a man, growing strong hauling grain bags on my back and slopping hogs. I taught him a lesson in the power of fear. It was bad for him but more dangerous for me. At 13 I learned that any dispute could be ended with a fist or steel lunch pail. For me that was a dangerous thing.
Crime paid well where I grew up. Driving a guy to Montreal so he could hustle hashish earned $200
Looking back I was lucky. My parents loved me. My mother quietly helped me understand the complexities of the world and my father had a library that I devoured, unlike my peers. They were mostly broken kids who could hardly read and who could not see over the wall. Their options were simple. Be a labourer on a wage that wasn’t a living. Go on a benefit that was close to starvation rations, or get into crime.
And crime paid well where I grew up. Driving a guy to Montreal so he could hustle hashish and pills to rich city kids in nightclubs earned $200. The real business, however, was running heroin from the port of Montreal to the insatiable appetite of America. The men running that business were gang members, guys a few years older than me and many of my friends were their mules. Those gangs had names like Rock Machine, Les Atomes, and Les Gitans. They worked the same as gangs everywhere. Young kids with no prospects of their own, watched those with privilege have easy lives and could not understand the why and why not? The law became an inconvenience to them. Prison was just the cost of doing business. In Quebec, at the time, prison wasn’t the worst outcome. A bullet in the head for screwing up, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or working for the wrong gang was far worse. The drugs on the mules back worth more than their life.
On my 17th birthday I needed to make a choice and my love for my mother kept me from going the other way. A week later I was on a bus to the army and from there I never looked back.
For years I pretended that my childhood didn’t happen. I was a man without history. The stories of my youth changed depending on who wanted to know. My childhood was only talked about with a few fellow survivors and we usually only spoke when one of our other childhood peers went to prison or to the cemetery.
Fate or blind luck would see me meet my life partner at university five years later, the daughter of an ex-pat Kiwi. Circumstance would see her offered a job working at Auckland City Hospital 10 years later. We were in Toronto at the time, me in a successful ad agency, but she had supported my career for years, so I said, “What the hell. I’ll reinvent myself.”
At 34 I stepped off the plane in Auckland. A week later I was fishing off the rocks at Whatipu Beach with my partner’s cousin and a few weeks after that I was in a job as sales manager for a company that made equipment for the horse industry. After a couple of years the TAB made me the area manager in South Auckland, supervising 50 gambling outlets. Around then the writing reappeared. Stories about the people I worked with, the events I witnessed, and comparisons with the places I’d left behind. The writing grew into a daily habit. I did character studies of people losing money to gambling, the desperate, the victims, the witnesses, and my fellow staff, especially the Polynesian women. Something about their lives touched a nerve and I began to reflect on my own childhood.
My book Inside the Black Horse is a compressed account of years of events I recorded in my diary, compressed into five days after a desperate act by a young man with no options left. I can’t wait to see the TVNZ adaptation.
Vegas, the $6.5million TVNZ series based on Ray Berard’s 2016 crime novel Inside the Black Horse, starts tonight (Monday April 15) on TV2 at 8:30pm. The author will appear at the Auckland Writers Festival on May 14.
