CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Traveling in a fried up combi.
It sounds like a “Men at Work” song from the eighties. Actually, it was. But I was there back then and a few of us guys decided to drive to Melbourne from Sidney.
I need to set the stage here.
The guys were mates I met at the “Still on the Hill.” Pretty famous out of Sydney, Australia. A large pub with many pool tables and dart boards. Good ole guys that worked hard and played hard. They took me under their wing to do construction. Most of it was concreting driveways, back then it was a gold mine. Construction was priceless. A few hours and you made $100. So it was a good business.
So we were driving down south and the driver had an accident at work a couple years earlier. He was brilliant. He could recall what was in Bin 17 in the warehouse, and give you an accurate count of everything in the whole warehouse. He got into an accident at work where a forklift made a bad turn. He was awarded $88,000 in damages. He went off the edge thinking he would die off in a few years so he bought the VW bus that we were traveling in. No matter what I said to him he wanted to go.
He had no more will to go on.
I let it go; he had made up his mind. Previously I spoke with his mother. I thought she was okay but when she talked about him some thoughts were difficult for me to understand. She felt comfortable talking to me and she told me when the boy was little he cried a lot. So she would spike his milk with vodka. The problem was she laughed about it like it was a normal thing! She tanked her son up before he knew what was going on. What could you expect raising an alcoholic as a toddler?
Time would tell and it did.
To this day I will never forget that. A child who doesn’t know what is going on, and born into a world, and this is what he gets