K Road is a true microcosm of New Zealand society, says David Merritt. He recounts what led him to ply his trade as a curbside poet.
Listen to the story as it was told at The Watercooler storytelling night or read on.
For a brief while, some time ago now, I was an expert on the politics and culture of computer operating systems. I was living in office, room 707, seventh floor, E-block, Wellesley St campus.
By then I'd been using a computer for 14-18 hours a day for the last 18 years. I was at the beginning of a spectacular midlife crisis, coupled with tertiary education burnout and a significant nervous breakdown. The year was 2002.
I fled academia and moved to Whanganui and took a job as the racing subeditor for the local newspaper, The Chronicle. My job was to take the racing fields off the NZPA wire system and massage them into comprehensive, straight columns of horse, jockey, trainer, previous five-race history, etc ... This involved pressing the tab and escape buttons repeatedly with the occasional return key for four or five hours a night.
Eventually both my sons came and lived with me as they went through high school. By 2006 I had an empty nest, so I downsized and moved out to a place called Mangamahu, 55kms from anywhere. Hunterville is my closest town.
It’s what I call rural gothic - commercial cannabis growers, hunters, gang members, guns, death, highly marginal sheep farming country atop the heavily-eroded hills and pine forest plantations increasingly owned by Canadian and Japanese pension funds. But there is no dairying up the valley, so the creek water is still reasonably clean.
I dug in, raised bed gardens and started rehabbing former battery-farmed chooks while my neighbour and I started to farm old Land Rovers from the ‘60s and ‘70s. I lasted three winters before the cabinfever really set in and then I went off on a small tour with friends in a travelling cabaret show.
They hassled me about merchandise, that I should have something for sale, so I bought some old 10 cent books from the Nelson dump recycling shop, gutted them into the paper reclaim skip, turned the covers inside out and made ten copies of small publication called Geek Prayers using a stamp-pad set, a stapler and a gluestick.
I was at the beginning of a spectacular mid-life crisis, coupled with tertiary education burnout and a significant nervous breakdown.
I think I sold all ten copies I had made that first night and in one fell swoop became the third highest grossing poet in the world.
After the tour ended, I headed up to Auckland’s K Road, what I considered to be the most liberal, relaxed and safest part of the big smoke for a curbside poet to ply their trade.
When I started making books in public and giving them away I was technically mad and angry and vexed. For three years I sat on a bench down from Margaret, a K Road institution who cussed and swore and cadged smokes off me everyday as she drank her way through a cask of red wine.
On the first day I set up, a group of Indians who worked as coding geeks for Telecom stopped and watched me for about 20 minutes as I labouriously stamped, stapled and glued books. Finally, one came over and told me that I reminded them of back home where "you see old people on the side of the road making shit out of nothing all the time".
K Road is a crossroads of class, race and gender. It bubbles with enthusiasm and at times sadness. You have to adopt strategies to cope. You're constantly asked for spare change, bus fares, cigarettes and papers.
People hustle you, try to sell you weed, a stolen iPod or cellphone. And on the whole I've been very lucky. I've been punched a couple of times by drunks, ripped off more times than I'd care to think about, and even vomited on. Not bad for six years, really.
You are part counsellor, part bad role model, part mad uncle to a bunch of youngsters trying to find their own ways in life. When I started out doing this, I literally felt like I had nothing to lose and in a strange paradox, six years later I've managed to both give and receive a great deal from those around me.
I've been punched a couple of times by drunks, ripped off more times than I'd care to think about, and even vomited on.
K Road, where the bench is that I sit at, is a true microcosm of New Zealand society, but for some people it’s a place of intimidation and fear. It has more than its fair share of facial tattoos and blethering drunks, street workers high on methamphetamine or gangly transsexuals teetering in high heels and miniskirts. It has a hugely multi-ethnic community gathered around it. These people are the grist for my observational mill.
Traditionally, the most commonly used words associated with the word "poet" is either slack or useless. I set out to deliberately destroy that unfair perception by working arduous 12 hour days from 8am till 8pm so any passer-by would take notice. I was 97 percent friendly and cheerful.
Nowadays, I'm on the K a bit less, befitting my burgeoning role as elder statesperson of New Zealand literature. In reality, I do a hell of a lot of touring and markets and festivals and events up and down the country.
I was looking for and found a community among the trannies, the grifters, the drunks and stoners, the cafe owners and the second-hand clothing shop assistants.
Within five years of making the books, which is more or less as a hobby, I've moved myself in little stages from a broken sickness beneficiary to unemployed to now - with the exception of an occasional food grant - someone free of the WINZ treadmill, hopefully forever. I don't even have a bank account.
This story was originally told at The Watercooler, a monthly storytelling night held at The Basement Theatre. If you have a story to tell email thewatercoolernz@gmail.com or hit them up on Twitter or Facebook.
Illustration: Emile Holmewood of BloodBros.
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