I was thirty.
That is the part people forget when they hear thirty three years. They hear one long slide, one man going down in a straight line from a boy to a wreck. It was not like that. There was a door in the middle of it. I found it once, twenty years ago, and I walked through it, and the reason I walked through it was a man named Josh Brown.
I called him JB.
I do not remember being introduced to him. I remember that he came in, and inside about a minute we were not two men meeting. We were old friends who had been apart a while. You get that maybe twice in a life if you are lucky. No warming up, no working out where you stand. Just, oh, there you are, where have you been.
I had a name for what we were and I have never come up with a better one. Ebony and ivory.
Two keys off the same piano. Nothing alike. Sitting right next to each other. And you cannot get a note out of that thing worth listening to unless you have got both.
He got me clean.
I want to be careful how I say this, because it is the truest thing in the story and I do not want to make it sound smaller than it was by dressing it up. He did not lecture me. He did not save me. He did not sit me down and explain my life to me. He was just there, and he was doing it himself, and he made it look like a thing a man like me could actually do.
That is all it takes. That is the whole secret and nobody believes it. You do not need a program to walk in the door first. You need one bloke standing on the other side of it who looks like you and talks like you and is somehow, impossibly, alright.
And he did look like me. He was Māori too.
I did not know what to do with that at the time. I was thirty and I did not know a single thing about where I came from. Nobody had told me. I had a Māori grandfather whose name meant safe harbour and I could not have told you that, or what a whakapapa was, or one line of the reo.
But there he was. A Māori man, in the same hole I was in, climbing out of it.
I did not have the words then. I do now, twenty years too late to say them to him. He was the first one. He was the first time in my whole life that being Māori and being well were standing in the same room, and I walked toward him without even knowing that was what I was walking toward.
He was my proof. And I got clean.
And now I will tell you the thing I actually want you to know about him, because the rest of this is going to get heavy and this is the part that should go first.
He was funny as fuck.
He had a laugh that got into you. You know the kind. It did not matter what he was laughing at. Once he started you were going too, and you would be halfway through laughing yourself before you even worked out what the joke was. A man who can do that just by opening his mouth is carrying something the rest of us have to work at.
And he could play.
I never saw him play rugby proper. But we played touch together, and mate, he played like Benji Marshall. That is not me being generous to a dead friend. Same feet. Same hands. Same thing where the ball comes out of them at an angle that should not work and it works anyway. He led the team. He scored plenty of tries.
I would have been about thirty three by then.
Sit with that for a second. Two blokes who had been in the game, out on a field on a weeknight, running around, scoring tries, laughing.
And then there was the night we played against Dale Shearer and Steve Renouf.
The Pearl. Broncos. Kangaroos. Actual legends of the game, standing on the other side of a touch field looking at us.
I did not even have boots. I turned up in shoes. Everyone else has got sprigs in the ground and I have got a pair of trainers on grass, and I have got about five Coronas in me, and they have put me on Dale Shearer in defence.
So he gets the ball and I come at him. And I want to be clear about this, I did not mean to do what I did. I could not slow down. No sprigs, wet grass, five beers, and a body already committed.
I levelled him.
Dale Shearer, flat on his back, and me standing over him going oh no.
I picked him up. I said sorry bro. He was alright about it, better than he needed to be.
And about two minutes later I was off the side of that field putting all five Coronas back into the grass.
I think we lost. I honestly cannot remember the score.
What I remember is that Josh kept us in the game.
That is what I remember. Not the try count, not who won, not me spewing in the dark with my hands on my knees. Him, out there, holding a losing side together against blokes who had played for their country, because that is what he did.
He kept us in the game.
He did that for me for years and I did not have the sense to notice it was a pattern.
That is what clean looked like. And nobody tells you that part. They tell you everything you have to give up. Nobody ever sits you down and says, right, here is what you get. You get a Tuesday night. You get a team. You get a mate who laughs like that. You get your own body doing what a body is meant to do.
I had it. For a while there I had the whole thing.
Then I lost it.
I am not going to spend long here, because it took twenty years and it does not deserve twenty pages. I went back under. The wheke got its arms around me again and this time it kept me for two decades. I lost things in there I am still counting. And somewhere in all that dark water, out of my reach and out of my sight, my friend died.
I was not there.
I have turned that over every way it can be turned and it comes out the same every time. He held the door open for me once and when it was his turn there was nobody holding one for him, and I was not there. I was in it. I was so far down in it that I could not have reached up for anyone.
That is not an excuse. I know the difference. An excuse is a thing you offer so you can put something down. I am not putting this down.
But here is what I have worked out, at fifty years old, in a room with a hard bed and a notebook and forty six days behind me.
He is still keeping me in the game.
Because the thing he taught me at thirty was not a trick or a phrase. It was that a man like me can do it. And that never expired. It sat in me the whole twenty years, all the way down, through everything, and when I finally stood on a road at Nerang with a phone in my hand and a number in the phone, the thing that turned me around was not new information.
It was old information. It was his.
He put it in me two decades ago and it was still good.
And there is one more thing in it that I have only just seen, writing this down.
I am doing it the Māori way this time. Te Whare Tapa Whā. The four walls. My body, my mind, my whānau, my wairua, and the whenua under the lot of it. I am at my mother's house learning the language of my own grandparents at fifty years old, and I have got a chart of my line going back four hundred years to a chieftainess.
That is the road I am on now. And the first man who ever showed me that road existed was a Māori man in a room twenty years ago who did not lecture me once.
He did not know he was doing that. I did not know he was doing it. Neither of us had the words.
He started it, though. He started it and then he was gone, and I have picked it up again at the other end of my life and I am carrying it home.
So when I write his name in my notebook I write Arohanui over the top of it. Because that word does the two jobs I need doing at once. It means I love you and it means goodbye, and I never got to say either one to him properly, so I say them both together, in a language he probably never heard me speak.
And I have worked out where he goes.
I am nearly out of skin. Poppy has done almost all of me, and I did the front of my own legs because I could not reach around the back. My sister's name is on me. The Warriors emblem is on me for a woman I have loved since I was seven.
There is one bit of space left, on my right hand.
That is my strong side. That is the trowel hand. Thirty three years of plaster and paint, the one thing that never once failed me. That is the hand that smashed the phone. That is the hand that holds the pen, and the hand my brother put my grandfather's shark tooth into, and the hand I close around that tooth when a wave comes up at me in the night.
My grandad held a harpoon in that same hand, on his own, in a dinghy, and killed two great whites with it.
The trade in my family was never the fishing. It was the holding on.
So that is where JB goes. Two letters on the strong side, on the working hand, on the last piece of room I have got left.
Not so I remember him. I was never going to forget him.
So that every single time I pick up the trowel, or the pen, or my grandfather's tooth, or my own life, the man who showed me it could be done is right there on the hand doing it.
Ebony and ivory, mate.
Still can't get a note out of it on my own.
And you are still keeping me in the game.
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