Girl's best friend

My future's looking bright and rosy
My girl's best friend puts her hand in mine...
- The Datsuns, 2004

It’d been a while since I’d run proper 2IC duty on a proper road trip. Apparently I sucked at it, because at some stage I’d nodded off. FAIL. To be fair I wasn’t on my Pat Malone there, Hollywood had got his head down in case he was needed for the final stint into Picton and D could pretty much sleep anywhere, anytime. Still, it was my job to keep Bear on the ball, not theirs. Luckily there’d been some serious drivers’ road which had done that for him. 500 horsepower, wet winding tarmac and no traction control kept his attention on the job as well, he reported, as I woke to the dim lights of Kaikoura circa 1.30am strobing weakly through the windows. Nice little town, very pretty surroundings. Not that we’d see any of it tonight.

Hollywood opened an eye. “Want me to take it from here?”

“You OK to?” Bear inquired.

“Course,” Hollywood maintained. “Always right to drive.”

“A certain flatbed truck headed to Christchurch says you ain’t…”

“Fuck off and give me the damn keys, Queenslander.”

Fail to perform and you get relegated to the bench. Bear took 2IC for the run to Picton; he’d had a large bottle of Coke in his left paw for much of the drive, at least until the road got twisty as it headed into the ranges of North Canterbury, running along and crossing between river valleys as it sought a way north around the imposing craggy mountains. In any case he was caffeinated plenty and wasn’t sleeping any time soon. As with the run into Kaikoura, the run out of there hugs the coast for a good while, playing tag with the railway line in between the mountains and the surf, like the Great Ocean Road or the run from Cairns to Port Douglas. Not that we could see much of either tonight – persistent low cloud hid the former from the moonlight, and all of the latter we could see was the phosphorescence of the whitecaps crashing against the shore.

Still, it was kinda reassuring to be in a good-handling motor car in the hands of someone who knew the road well – particularly in the dark and in the wet, conditions in which Hollywood would claim he did his best work. Of course he was just doing so at the moment he lost the back end applying a few too many of those 500 horses on a slick bit of diesel-affected tarmac coming out of a sharp left-hander near the village of Clarence, and wobbled into an enormous tank-slapper that took a good hundred metres and most probably a few changes of underwear to sort out.

After Clarence the road opened out again, which was just as well probably - curving gently along the flat between the beach and the hills for the next thirty kay or so. I drifted in and out of consciousness, listening to the banter from the pair in front. You had to remind yourself it hadn’t been much more than 24 hours ago that they’d been shaping up to punch on with each other – though that had been a fairly busy 24 hours, to be fair.

Hollywood was still making excuses for his tankslapper. “This is the problem with stupid piece-of-shit autos, you lose control over when and where the thing decides to make its upshifts. Not like a proper manual.”

“What, so you can drive a manual?” interjected Bear with a laugh.

“Of course I can drive a fucking manual…”

“So why do all your Vee Dubs come with flappy paddle gearboxes?”

“I can drive a fucking manual,” he insisted.

“Got cameraphone footage somewhere of you bunny-hopping the fuck out of a rental car in England that says you can’t,” Bear pointed out.

“My 968CS track car. Six-speed fucking manual, thanks very much.”

“And how’d that end up again mate?”

“…Yeah fair point. Anyway manuals’ll be dead in five years. Ten maximum. It’ll be flappy-paddles and CVTs all the way. Dead technology. It’ll be a historic curiosity, like the typewriter or the film camera.”

“Might be right,” Bear conceded. “A clutch in this would need to be fucking enormous. You ever drive that insane Camaro 427 he had? Or were you busy turning up your nose at it?”

“I was with him when he picked it up. Took it for a lap of the industrial estate,” Hollywood replied.

“And?”

“Limping for weeks,” he declared with a laugh. “Depressing the clutch was like doing leg weights at the gym. No wonder he sold it.”

“This isn’t bad, though.”

“No, it’s not,” Hollywood concurred. “Admittedly he’s taken advantage of someone else’s R&D spend by getting the engine and gearbox as a package, the ABS in a box from Bosch, the suspension likewise…”

“Works, though. It’s coherent.”

“For a box of bits, yeah,” Hollywood said. “And it does make a pretty noise,” he added, breathing on the throttle and letting the thunder resonate against the hillsides.

“Of course, if the girl sees you roll up in something as bogan as this, your credibility’s gonna be fucked… or is westie chic back in this season?”

“No, it’ll be sweet as… might get you guys to drop me off ‘round the corner though, just in case.”
Hollywood had the ability to be self-deprecating. He just never used it.

“So, yeah… still waiting for that apology for last night,” Hollywood said.

Oh, fuck. Here we go.

“Me too,” Bear half-laughed. “You know me, mate. I don’t apologise for anything I don’t regret saying.”

“So all that stuff about Savannah…”

“Mate, I’m not gonna lie to you. She’s not exactly likeable.”

Hollywood snorted. “You don’t fucking sugar-coat much do you?”

“What’s the point?” Bear contended. “Known each other long enough not to bother with that shit surely?”

“Hmmm,” muttered Hollywood. If he started aiming the passenger side at a tree, I was barrel-rolling out of the fucker. Gravel-rash at 130 had to be better than blunt force trauma from a sudden stop. Then, he shook his head, and chuckled to himself.

“What?” Bear asked, slightly edgy.

Hollywood gave an ironic smile. “You’ll probably be fucking delighted to hear I’m banging her best friend on the sly…”

“You what?”

“Yeah, thought that might amuse you.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“Dude, I thought this was The One? For serious?”

“No. Fuck no. It just…” Hollywood laughed. “Turned serious faster that I ever fucking wanted it to. All of a sudden she’s moved in, we’ve got the same circle of friends, she’s in my ear every moment of the day… fucking hard work trying to do the short term shag thing at thirty, I tell you.”

“She doesn’t know then?”

“Fuck no.”

“Is the friend any better? Any less punishing?”

“Fuck no. She’s another clone from the same production line.”

“Nicko,” Bear said with a chuckle, “why the hell are you banging either of them then?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Got to do something to keep me out of the White House don’t I?”

For the record, the White House was somewhat less presidential than its American equivalent, being as it was the country’s first, largest and shiniest legal bordello.

“So, the conversation’s punishing. The world view’s limited… be fair, it is. The personal space is non-existent. All your mates have been kicked off the social calendar, and all her mates are even more punishing than she is. Not seeing an upside.” Bear paused. “Unless she fucks like a banshee.”

Hollywood nodded smugly. “Affirmative,” was all he’d say.

“Jesus, she must be willing to get up to some pretty nasty shit to make up for the rest of it.”

“All that and more, mate. But a gentleman never tells.”

“…So what, she takes it up the arse then?”

“What?”

“You said a gentleman never tells. None of them cunts in here…” Bear grinned belligerenty. “Nah, what was it that got you into grief with whatshername Casoli that time? Offering her a spit roast with that fucking dodgy bastard from [band name deleted on legal advice]?”

Some bands got bad writeups from Kas because she didn’t like their sound. Some bands got bad writeups from Kas because she had her nose out of joint over something or other. Hayabusa and Another Unnamed Australasian Band (not ours) got bad writeups from Kas because backstage at a BDO several years ago a heavily snowblind Nick Holland had inquired of her whether she’d be interested in a ‘roast’. Not the sort of thing she’d be turning down a date with Tom Cruise to rush home for, as it turned out – judging by the way she reported the entire incident in excruciating detail, with names only barely obscured, in her next column for Uncle Rupert.

“Yes, well…” Hollywood said, colouring-up.

“Could at least have offered her choice of ends…”

“That’s what you would have done then? As a gentleman?”

“Nah mate, not my thing. I don’t share well with others. Seen enough other blokes’ hairy arses in rugby change rooms.”

“Yeah, I figured that’s what you rugger buggers get up to in there. Rumours are true.”

“So what’s the story, you’re sharing her with some other bastard as well? Gonna need a bloody flow chart here to figure out who’s fucking who…”

“No, no,” Hollywood clarified. “I’m sharing her with the BFF.”

“Ah,” Bear registered. “Much more like my kind of arrangement… And doing the BFF on the side?”

“…Yeah.”

“You live in interesting times,” quoted Bear.

Hollywood grinned, as he tiptoed around the back of a semi-trailer and brought overwhelming firepower to bear on the situation. There wasn’t a lot of straight road left along the coast before the lay of the land took the road back into the hills, and he planned to make the most of it. “Of course you would never have gotten up to that sort of immoral stuff would you now, young Christian? What happens in the backpackers’ hostel stays in the backpackers’ hostel?”

“Well, travel’s supposed to broaden the mind… fuck, I’ve got to get on the road again, hey.”

“We are on the road. This black shiny thing with the fucking lines on it.”

“You know what I mean mate. Been camped in D-town for months. Just feel like chucking a bunch of stuff in a bag and fucking off for a while. Got cabin fever. If you can get cabin fever in a whole country.”

“Well, nothing’s stopping you… nothing’s stopping you if you never want to come back,” Hollywood pointed out. “What’s here to keep you? May as well fuck off to Noosa or somewhere…”

“Yeah, not that easy,” he replied. “Like it or not, I’m not a Queenslander. Not really a Kiwi either, but I’ve spent longer here than I have anywhere else. If anything’s home, it’s… Dunedin, I guess.”

“What a fucking depressing thought that is.” Hollywood pressed the top of his thighs against the wheel while he carefully unscrewed the lid of his six-hundred of Diet Coke, taking advantage of the straight road while it lasted, which it wouldn’t. “I’ve seen what you do when you’re at home. Cleaned your fucking bathroom, remember.”

Bear laughed. “Yeah, sorry about that… bloody amazed you bothered, figuring the Battered Sav wouldn’t be keen on staying there.”

“Battered Sav, that’s good, I like that. Sounds like you’ve seen her without her makeup on. Better than fucking Sierra Cosworth anyway, that’s shit.”

“Yeah, go fuck yourself,” he laughed. “Kiss my arse. Clean my bathroom.”

“Yeah, did that. And she still turned up her fucking nose so we had to stay somewhere else…”

“Fuck, no… man, that’s classic.”

“Yeah, laugh it up, cunt. I’m scraping bodily fluids off your bathroom tiles and you’re at my winery drinking my wine. That’s fucking friendship for you.”

“Not bad plonk either. Decent place you’ve got up there now. It’ll do well. Might even make back the profits we managed to drink on you.”

“Sounds like you made yourselves at home, anyway…”

“Mate if I had a cellar like that at home I’d never leave the fucking house. Not to mention the waitstaff waiting on you hand and foot. And other places.”

“What did you do to my waitstaff?”

“OK, OK. Not technically your waitstaff. But still service industry, sort-of. Said she was there to please. Said I’d had a rough time of it and deserved to have a smile put on my face.”

“Wha…” The cogs of Hollywood’s mind were turning remarkably slowly, but then again it was nearing half-two and he’d been living in interesting times for a while now. “Lena?”

Bear nodded, with a bemused grin.

“Fuck! Does Angus know?”

“Why are you whispering?” Bear laughed. “Course he does, he was on the other end of her... no, no,” he giggled. “Yeah, he knows, he had to share a car with us on the way back.”

“So what… she just marched into your room and said, “You look depressed, cheer up, wanna fuck?”

“Well not in those words… actually yeah, almost exactly those words, come to think of it.”

“Jesus,” Hollywood remarked.

“Nah, didn’t fuck him.” Bear was having a lot of fun with this. Almost as much as he’d had with Lena. “Have to say it’s the least effort I’ve ever put into picking up. Get drunk. Go to bed. Get woken up by girl with no pants on standing in doorway.”

“Have humiliating three-minute drunken shag before passing out.”

Bear flashed a winning smile. “It’d really fuck you off if I told you it was an hour and change, and she wouldn’t take ‘And I’m spent’ for an answer…”

“Yeah but you’d just be making shit up then.” Hollywood considered his position. “Then again I’ve got a laundry bill for scraping the sheets that bears out your story…”

The road kept heading north, but this now drew it away from the coast and back into the parched hills of southern Marlborough, a little like Central Otago in their brownness and barrenness though a lot more crumpled and lumpy. I’m a geologist me. Not that we could see any of it in the dark, other than the road beginning to gently zigzag uphill and the margins beginning to be hemmed in by rocky hillsides again. Scenic drives in the dark: quite fucking pointless.

“Bye bye coastline,” Bear observed. “Last we’ll see of it until the ferry, yeah?” Hollywood nodded. “Weird,” Bear continued. “Never felt comfortable being too far from the ocean. Always been happier when I could see… what?”

“Still can’t believe you slept with Lena.”

“Didn’t sleep.”

“I was trying to be polite, you cunt.” Hollywood had to pay attention to the road now, which meant the diet Coke went into the cupholders. “Not that she’s not bedworthy… fucking tidy for a big girl, just quietly…”

“You gonna stop obsessing about me having sex with Lena anytime soon?” Bear muttered. “I suppose when you spend your nights snorting coke off your girlfriend’s tits while her best mate does her with a strap-on, two fairly normal people having normal sex with each other because they happen to be attracted to each other at the time must be the weirdest, kinkiest shit in the universe, huh?”

“That’s not how it works.”

“What, she’s doing you with the strap-on then?”

“I’m just surprised, Chris. That’s all. And happy. I’m happy for you, buddy.”

“Enough with the patronising bullshit, we’re not getting married, we only slept together.”

“Thought you said you didn’t sleep?”

“I’m trying to be a gentleman, you douche-felching goatfucker.”

“I can see that. So are you going to see her again?”

“Well, she’s in Sydney, and I’m not. What do you think?” Bear rolled his eyes. I couldn’t see him from where I was sitting, but London to a brick he rolled his eyes at that point. “Reading a fuckload more into this than you should. Christ’s sake, we spent most of the day rolling around Lake Wakatipu retracing her dead ex-boyfriend’s last hours. She needed some sort of release. I’m not dumb enough to pretend that wasn’t her real motivation.”

“That surely would have made it weird…”

“You had two people who’d both decided to try very hard not to make it weird,” Bear replied. “At least until the drive home.” He shook his head. “Did, a little. For about thirty seconds. Then I figured fuck it, she broke up with him, what, six years ago. Non-issue.”

“Just grateful she’d picked you to throw herself at rather than Angus…” Hollywood offered consipiratorially.

Bear frowned.

“Not awake is he?”

“Hardly matters, you’d say the same to his face I hope,” Bear said with a hint of reproach.

“Anyway, that would have been weird.”

My ears were burning. Still, I couldn’t be bothered piping up. Sometimes you learn a lot more by keeping quiet.

“Has he never…”

“Fuck no. Don’t think so.”

“Shit, really? Wonder why? Opportunity must have been there…”

“Yeah, but… put it this way, would you have a crack at Aroha?”

Hollywood considered this carefully.

“Now? Of course not. Fuck no... But in six years time, all parties willing?”

I drifted out of the conversation at that point. Partly because fatigue was about to claim me, but mostly because I didn’t really want to know Hollywood’s answer to that.

Or maybe it was a rhetorical question and I fell asleep waiting for an answer.

Four-thirty, read the luminous dial on my watch. Which was a problem. By four-thirty, we were supposed to be in Picton, ahead of our 5am check-in deadline. The problem was, I’d seen Picton, and this wasn’t it. At least I didn’t think this was it. This was the side of a road, somewhere. Still looked like the same sort of countryside I’d nodded off in – parched, brown, immersed in moonlight-etched darkness - except the roadsides were flatter and fringed with vines. Marlborough wine country. Still somewhere around Blenheim, probably. And while that was a problem, the real issue was that we were sitting, idling, by the side of the road, with noone in the driver’s seat.

Bear was staring off into the distance in a resigned sort of way. It didn’t look good, on first glance.

“What’s going on, Bear?” I asked, trying to hide the slight panic in my voice.

An ironic chuckle. Didn’t sound too good either, knowing Bear’s dark sense of humour. “We stopped a while back so Nicko could go for a slash. Problem was, the big fucker wouldn’t start again.”

“Oh Christ, not again…”

“Yeah. Again.”

I immediately started groggily filing through the options. Something was draining the battery. Leakage to earth? Ancillaries? Barry had crammed a hell of a lot of electrical stuff into this thing, more so than most stuff he built apart from the blinged-up, heavily-accessorized show cars, and they usually ran additional batteries and stuff. Maybe he’d underspecced the electrical system. Or maybe there was a sick alternator, or something else causing a net loss of charge.

“What’ve we done, called the AA?”

“No time,” Bear replied. “It’d be daylight before they turn up. No use for us really.”

“Fucking arse,” I observed. The Interislander deadline mightn’t have seemed like much – just get on the next boat later in the day, yeah? - except this was the high point of the Xmas/New Year holidays. The ferries were heavily booked, particularly for vehicles, which were the most space-limited of all the cargo on board the Interislanders. It could be days before we got another slot. Or we could get lucky and it could be the same day, but we weren’t that interested in taking the chance.

“So what’s the plan, what are we doing?”

“What did we do, you mean?” Bear mused. “What Nicko does best. Talk. Called the operations manager for his winery up in Central, got him out of bed. Got contact details for his opposite number at the plant up here – where all the stuff actually goes to get bottled, you might have noticed there’s fuck all actual processing done down in Central. Got hold of security there. Talked them into putting two blokes into a truck and heading into town to find a bright orange Valiant full of international fuckin’ rock stars parked outside the public facilities. Christ knew what they thought at the time. Came down here. Popped the bonnet. Jump-started the fucker. Went on their way with a couple of camera photos of them with me and Nick – didn’t think it was fair to wake you or the big unit – couple of signed albums and the promise of a case of wine each sorted through the plant, which that dodgy little bastard better sort for them or I’ll fucking slap the prick silly.”

The Pacer rocked gently on its springs with the lumpy idle of the Hemi. This was taking a while to sink in. Cut me some slack, I’d just woken up.

“So Hollywood saves the day?”

“Sort of. Ask him to fix a broken car and he’ll fret about splitting a nail, ‘cos he has no fucking idea. But if you need a deal done, he can fix that, no problem at all.”

“So where is he?”

Bear chuckled, as a lone figure emerged out of the vines, ducked through the wire fence and sprinted across the road, old-school Le-Mans-start style, grabbing for the door and vaulting into the driver’s seat.

“Still needed to have that slash, after all that…”

“I’m good,” reported Hollywood, out of breath.

“Wash your hands?”

“Nah, just my boots,” he replied, jamming his belt into the buckle and reaching for the keys. A hideous graunch indicated he’d already started the car up. How he could miss it, fucked if I could tell. Slightly flustered, he flicked his eyes towards the empty mirrors, slotted the stick to D, and floored it. Gravel shot-peened the rear wheel arches as the big Pacer slithered onto the blacktop and charged for Picton.

It was only thirty kays to Picton, and we had most of a half-hour to get it done. But one more problem and we were royally fucked. And, as Hollywood reported, there was plenty of scope for that. Once we left the plains immediately surrounding Blenheim and headed back into the valleys through the range, the road would get unhelpful pretty damn quickly. The coppers were about, too. But the main problem was… jumpstarting it had kinda fucked the car.

“Trip computer,” Hollywood began, indicating the small racecar-style MoTec digital display designed to update with information on fuel usage, distance to empty, average consumption, oil pressure, water temperature and so on - useful info that wasn’t necessarily reported with much accuracy by the retro-cool dials in the dash. “That’s fucked. Entertainment unit, DVD, stereo, that’s fucked. The little electronic brain which tells the electric motors which way to twiddle the suspension adjustment knobs, that’s fucked. Basically, if it’s electronic, it’s fucked.”

“ECU?” I winced. Meaning engine computer.

“Fucked. Not happy, anyway. Fuelling's all over the fucking shop, popping and farting... I mean, you can hear it, it’s running, but it’s lumpy as boarding school custard.”

“You boarding school boys know all about each others’ custard yeah? Soggy Saos and all?”

Hollywood was ignoring that. He wasn’t even taking the opportunity for another rant about the failings of backyard engineering projects. Which meant he was pretty bloody concerned. To be fair, that misfire sounded pretty fucking awful, like someone had ripped out a couple of spark plug leads and we were running on maybe six and a half cylinders. The jump start had fried its poor confused electronic brain. Sick and dying, the Pacer loped through the darkness; might make it, might not. Which left Hollywood to emulate the Battle of Britain pilots from the war comics of his childhood, and nurse his crippled Merlin-engined Spitfire, smoking badly and shot full of holes by the dirty Boche, back over the Channel and safely home to RAF Biggin Hill and the warm embrace of a friendly WAAF. Or something.

Sure, he probably overdid it by completing the journey in twelve minutes at an average speed of 150 kays, but power corrupts, and absolute power – even diluted by frazzling one’s engine computer – still corrupts absolutely.

Hollywood rolled the Pacer into town, following the signs for the Interislander jetty, before flicking left at the roundabout instead of straight-on, and giving the Pacer one last blast up the hill that constituted the start of Queen Charlotte Drive to Havelock – the road that wound along the shoreline of the sounds. I wondered for a moment if he was on autopilot and if we’d end up parked outside the jetty where his boat was moored further down the road, rather than the ferry to Wellington, but before I could open my mouth he was pulling over halfway up the hill, guiding the Pacer into the gravel lay-by next to the viewing area which overlooked the harbour.

“Gentlemen, I give you… Picton. On time and under budget.”

It was an awe-inspiring sight. The horizon was just beginning to lighten, just beginning to allow the morning light to play in between the craggy green islands and bluer-than-blue waters of the sounds. It could have been the most beautiful place in the entire country – a title for which was serious competition in a country like New Zealand. The overwhelming visual spectacle sucked the air from your lungs and made your senses ache, all the more keenly given the mission it’d become just getting here. I could have stood here all morning, watching the light slowly filling up the harbour. We didn’t have all morning, we only had ten minutes left to get back down to the harbour basin and check in, but even that brief taste was worth it. Just to be sure we could make it, Hollywood had left the engine running.

D emerged from the back. We’d wondered why the snoring had stopped.

“Hey boys,” he yawned. “Miss anything?”

“Nah, mate,” Bear replied. “Pretty uneventful trip.”

Cook Strait, normally big and angry like Gorden Tallis on a ‘roid bender, was flat and glassy. The Interislander ferry Kaitaki steamed serenely across the strait towards the crumpled heads of Wellington harbour, as they began looming out of the morning mist. Or was that fog? I’m a geologist me, not a fucking meteorologist. I was standing on the top deck, takeaway coffee in one hand, the other pressing my iPhone to my ear. Work was calling. Or more literally, Triple J breakfast were calling from a studio in Ultimo. It was all very surreal. Particularly considering they’d somehow gotten the Duffer up as well – insurance in case they couldn’t reach me (and considering I was on the deck of a big fuck-off boat crossing Cook Strait it was vaguely impressive they could) – and I was having a phone conversation with one of my oldest mates on national radio, while watching the wind turbines on the ridge behind Wellington City barely registering enough breeze to rotate, from the deck of an Interislander ferry. Had to be a first for windy Wellington, I predicted. It got a not less surreal when the conversational topic went from the weather to our effort for their ‘Like A Virgin’ covers segment – which I knew absolutely nothing about and was having a mild panic regarding. Ah yeah, we had a great time doing that… erm, Phil??

Phil knew the score. (Pretty sure any moment now we’d achieve a singularity of surrealness and the universe would contract to a single point of light and matter). He admitted they’d roped in a ring-in to cover for a certain guitarist who was swanning up and down the NZ coast with his Hayabusa mates. And then they played it… and I laughed, and laughed, and laughed, until tears streamed down my face and I dropped my coffee.

OK, imagine this, if you can. The Beastie Boys’ Sabotage. Good song, good riff, fucking awesome filmclip (not that important for radio I realise). Slightly annoying white-boy gangsta vocals, though that’s part of the Beasties’ charm of course. Key element though is that big drum sound, that insistant driving guitar riff, and swathes of scratching. Now do the following: Replace the white boy whine with the flat, nasal intonations of one Philip Duff, doing his best Lou Reed Spoken Word Tour impression. Replace the guitar and the scratchings with electric viola. No prizes for guessing who the ring-in might have been. Keep the drums, of course. Even bigger if possible, it was Phil’s project after all. The result: Heroically offensive to any Beasties fans. And yet somehow, somewhat compelling.

Yeeeeaaahhhh, can’t stand it. I know you planned it…

Of course the real question – the one to which all of Australia (or at least my increasingly cranky management) wanted an answer to – was why? Why was I on an Interislander ferry at half-six Australian Eastern Daylight Time on a Wednesday morning, two days before the Auckland Big Day Out?

“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” I admitted. “Look, me and the boys from Hayabusa… we kind-of decided we needed to do something. And that something ended up being taking Tractor’s big old Valiant on a road trip up state highway one, to bring it back to Auckland. Wasn’t planned, just worked out that way. See where it takes us. And now we’re in the middle of it, basically half way, I can’t think of any better way to remember the big bastard than to drive his awesome old battleship up this bloody beautiful country… OK now I’m babbling incoherently, it’s sleep deprivation. Hey can you play me that version of Sabotage again? That was fricken hilarious...”

The fog was lifting as we steamed into the Wellington harbour basin, the city draped over the hills like a crumpled tablecloth, houses tumbling down to the water’s edge. Hell’s Own Pacer didn’t want to start on cue, turning our roll-off into more of a push-‘n’-swear-off until we managed to secure a jump start from a friendly truck. We called Barry. He admitted he’d had his doubts about the alternator which Mopar Performance had specified for the job, he reckoned it was lighter duty than anything he’d put on even his carby-fed Hemi Chargers previously, but had bowed to their supposedly greater wisdom ref EFI crate motors. Bastards Key thing was, we weren’t to jump start the thing under any circumstances as he wasn’t sure how well the ancillary systems would stand up to it… oh.

Plan B. Which involved Bear and me setting upon the thing in a SuperCheapAuto carpark and attacking it with inferior-grade Chinese made tools from the discount bins. Barry was on loudspeaker on Bear’s phone, so at least we had responsible adult supervision of sorts. The idea was to decommission as many non-essential ancillaries as possible, in case they were still draining the system. Except this sounds like some sort of carefully thought-out, procedural, scientific response, whereas what we were basically doing was pulling out fuses until the thing wouldn’t start any more, then putting the last one back and hoping for the best. The other thing we’d bought was a pair of big fuck-off Euro-spec DIN batteries designed for Northern hemisphere winters. One just about fit in the battery cradle for the Pacer, replacing the existing one – which was well over-specced from what Chrysler Australia had been sticking into the standard ones in 1971 – which had packed it in. The other went in the boot as a spare. What we really needed was a replacement alternator, but finding one to suit a 392 Hemi crate motor in Wellington on a Wednesday morning was not on the list of World’s Most Likely Occurrences. Barry reckoned it was actually the same part as they used on the standard 5.7 Hemi V8 in the 300C and Jeep Grand Cherokee, but the odds of the local Wellington Chrysler dealer having one in stock weren’t flash, mainly because Barry had already checked. He could have a replacement to us by tomorrow morning, but we could be on his doorstep by then anyway.

Fuck it, we figured, we’d nurse the big old bastard home, even with no stereo, no power windows and no wipers. (One other thing we’d bought – a bottle of Rain-X, just in case the weather turned to shit.) Besides, my last attempt at replacing an alternator on the side of a road – Tour de Pants ‘98 - hadn’t ended particularly well. Though technically it was Jeff fucking up the retensioning of the fanbelt on Sagittaria’s old HJ Premier wagon which had been at fault, largely as he’d been preoccupied trying to get into their pants.

Of course, after all that, the big old fucker wouldn’t start, but Bear and I figured that was probably because it’d flooded with the constant starting – the strong whiff of raw fuel about the place had to signify something. While we waited for the internals to dry out, D returned from the coffee cart from the nearby industrial estate, well-armed with supplies. Good man.

“Should have you back in the ‘Rua fairly shortly,” Bear pronounced. Porirua wasn’t too far over the back of the range from the harbour basin, where we were currently located.

D looked reflective. “All the same with you, boys,” he began, “reckon I might stay with.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” nodded D, sipping his coffee. “See where the journey takes us, eh.”

“Yeah,” grinned Bear. “Good shit.”

“Give it a crank?” I queried.

“May as well.”

I flicked the ignition on. The big Hemi laboured, then laboured some more, then THUNDERED into life. Seagulls that had settled on the railing fifty yards away scattered as though under machine-gun fire.

“I dub thee Thor,” I pronounced. “God of Thunder.”

“Fuck yeah,” Bear concurred. “Aww here’s trouble. Did we get him one?”

“’Course,” D replied, indicating the takeaway coffee resting on the gently rocking roof of the Pacer. “Half caf’ trim latte. Artificial sweetener.”

“Pink marshmallow?” queried Bear.

“Heavens no,” D minced, sucking air through his teeth. Was fucking hilarious when a big gruff bugger like him did it. “Think of his figure…”

“Ladies,” declared Hollywood. He’d spent the last 24 hours in the same dank, arse-scented confines that we had, and yet the bastard still looked fabulous. Hated him for that. Though he’d chosen to accessorize with a red shopping bag from the Warehouse - I didn’t think Hollywood had ever been to the Warehouse. He was allergic to poor people.

“Retail therapy, Hol?”

He smirked, reached into the bag and produced…

“The finest portable stereo money can buy,” he declared. “Well, twenty-eight bucks of money anyway.”

It was a big, nasty, cheap, grey plastic turd, like someone had melted down the inside of a base model Hyundai and turned it into consumer electronics. The brand I’d never heard of, I suspect they had a half-life comparable to heavy atoms of plutonium. It was truly hideous. But what it was, was the one thing we no longer had, and the one thing that we needed, given we had 500 kays of the north island to knock off before nightfall. Tunes. There was a big fuck-off aerial to hang out the window to pick up FM rock stations, a CD player for when we couldn’t – not that we had any CDs with us, but there were always shops – and a dozen D-cell batteries in the bag to keep the enterprise rolling along.

As the kids say on Twunter: AWSM.