A Bit Mental Read online

  I owe Mark for a lot of good times, but one particular day I owed him a little more than usual. As I said earlier, I like jumping off high things into water. It’s that sort of unstructured scary activity that makes me feel alive. Mark and I spent a lot of time on Waiheke Island and on this occasion we were at the jumping spot that Tim and I had discovered a year or so earlier. This time I was on a mission to do a backflip off the 17-metre high spot above the blowhole. There was a ledge below it that may have been 14 metres high and I decided I’d try from there first. I stood looking down. To do a backflip you start facing the cliff, so I turned around and looked over my shoulder to the small landing spot below. I was really scared. My body was shaking slightly and I was starting to perspire. It felt like I was looking over my shoulder for about five minutes. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me feel alive, though. I loved it. I was almost ready. Mark was down on the rocks below with his camera. After much contemplation and a lot of talking to myself I threw my head and arms backwards off the cliff and into midair. I love that feeling. I can feel it right now, remembering. It is beautiful.

  As I was floating in the perfect silence and stunning surroundings I quickly realised I had thrown myself into a spin that was too fast. I over-rotated and my head and torso hit the water with maximum force. It’s like hitting concrete. I blacked out. I came to and what I saw was surreal; I have never encountered anything else like it. It looked like a movie. The water was crystal clear and only about three metres deep. I was on the bottom looking up. It was peaceful. I knew I needed to get to the surface but I couldn’t move so I just lay still and slowly floated to the top.

  As soon as my head broke the water I started gasping for air and calling to Mark. ‘Help me, help me, help me!’ It was all I could say and I couldn’t stop saying it. I was winded as well as concussed. All of this felt like it had taken forever when Mark jumped in to rescue me. I still couldn’t move and he pulled me to the rocks and helped me up. Add another concussion to my list. Why had I even tried that? I’m a dick.

  The adventures continued and one day Mark and I were brainstorming things to do when we decided that we should float down a river. Why? Because floating down rivers is fun. Mark grew up in the Karangahake Valley, near Thames, and suggested that the river in the valley might be suitable for our purpose. So we went to the Warehouse and purchased some Lilos and small rafts and off we went.

  It was a lovely day. We had taken two cars, one to park at the bottom and the other to take us to the top. We had picked a distance that we figured would be about right but, really, we had no idea. It wasn’t like either of us had done this before. No matter, we started floating. Neither of us really had any paddling experience, plus we hadn’t figured out if there were any dangers on this part of the river. Nonetheless, there we were already floating down the river and it was another adventure!

  We had been going for about four hours: it was getting cold and we didn’t really know where we were. Was the car up ahead? Or had we passed it? The river wasn’t anywhere near the road at that stage. We had to make a decision, so we hopped out and tried to find the road. When we finally did, Mark thought the car was further on and we continued down the road on foot.

  Despite these misadventures, we managed to have a quality float down the river and saw the potential of the idea. So, the only thing that was left was to take the next logical step that rears its head in most of our adventures that are fun. We knew it would be a lot more fun if all of our friends came with us. And so the Jimi Ninja River Adventure was born.

  The rules were pretty simple: you must dress up like an idiot and bring $10 to cover the cost of the food that I would cook for everyone. Guaranteed fun for all.

  Here is where I can rant, in print, about my generation and people younger than me. For the record, I’m 32. We are useless at turning up to things. It’s the curse of modern technology. We can now cancel last minute by text or phone call. We can ‘join’ an event on Facebook and it doesn’t really matter if we turn up or not. Why am I having a cry about this? Because the Jimi Ninja’s first river adventure had 35 people ‘confirmed’ to attend. So, I’d spent $350 on food for the grand day out. The morning of the adventure I got up all excited: it was time to play, everything was sorted, but it was raining. Over the next hour I had 20 cancellations. The 15 of us that took part arrived at the starting point in blistering sunshine. It was glorious.

  JIMI’S LESSON #3: 80 per cent of success is just showing up. —Woody Allen

  This lesson works perfectly for business too, but its application to friendship and my mental health is where I find it most relevant. That river event was a time when I remember feeling really quite despondent. As you have seen, I like to organise things for my friends and I put a lot of energy into that. On the downside, I tend to expect quite a bit in return, so I took it really personally when all those people pulled out. The 15 of us who shared the experience all had an amazing day. The adventure went perfectly. The weather was amazing, the river was ridiculously fun and the barbecue was outstanding. BUT at the time I couldn’t stop thinking about the people who hadn’t turned up. I was pissed off that I had a couple of hundred dollars worth of leftover food, and I kept coming back to the idea that it was something to do with me that had stopped those people turning up. They hadn’t come because they didn’t like me. Damn it. ‘Oh well,’ I thought, ‘bugger them. I don’t want to be their friend anyway. In fact, why am I bothering to put on these events? These people don’t care about them—they don’t even bother to turn up!’

  This was the first time that I think I felt ‘depressed’. We’d had an amazing time, but the money lost and the people not turning up were the overwhelming thoughts that filled my mind. It ate away at me. I hated that feeling and I hated those thoughts.

  ACROSS THE DITCH AND BACK AGAIN

  In 2006 I quit my job as the entertainment manager at a backpacker bar in Auckland and moved to Cairns in North Queensland, Australia, and ended up becoming an entertainment manager at a backpacker bar. This meant I continued my daily ritual of hosting game shows and jelly wrestling, doing adventure activities and chasing pretty foreign girls all in a warmer climate. I had left Auckland because I was bored and wanted a new challenge—nothing radical, just a new place, a new bar, some new people as well as the natural challenges like dealing with crocodiles, stingers, spiders, lizards, sharks and snakes.

  Cairns is a small town. As the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef it’s a tourist town. It was the perfect place for me to do the job I was good at—entertaining backpackers. I had turned up without knowing anyone though, so at first I was a little scared wandering the streets of a new town, with no friends, no job and no idea what I really wanted to do. But I liked the place. People looked as if they were at the beach even in the middle of town. It was hot and the sun was shining. The sun seems to make everyone happier. It was nice.

  Most things seem to work out for me. Even so, I was surprised as I was walking through Cairns that a guy recognised me, came up to me and said, ‘You’re Jimi from Globe Bar, aren’t you?’

  ‘Ummm, yeah, I am.’

  ‘Do you want a job hosting my pub crawl?’

  ‘Ummm, yeah, I do.’

  Done. I’d been in the place about five hours and I had a job. That night I was hosting a pub crawl for 150 amped-up backpackers. ‘This is good,’ I thought. But the problem with a pub crawl is you go to the exact same places and do the exact same things each time. It got pretty tiresome quite quickly and after a couple of weeks I needed to find something new.

  There is one place that stands out in the tourist scene in Cairns; called The Woolshed, it is renowned around the world as a place to party. This place is legendary for debauchery. Girls dance on tables, and if clothes are removed no one is complaining. Drinks are cheap and there is a party every night. Pretty soon I had a job there and was doing my best causing havoc. I was hosting lots of silly events—Ms Backpacker, Blind Date, The Electrocution Challenge, Fe
ar Factor, The World Goldfish Racing Championships and a bunch of others. It was great fun and I met some great girls in that time, from all over the world. I was a young man having the time of his life in a tropical paradise.

  Life Was Great.

  One night I left The Woolshed at about 5 am, which was pretty standard for me. I was very tired and got home to find an after-party for a band called Eskimo Joe in full swing. I wasn’t in the mood. I walked in with my skateboard under my arm and saw two extremely attractive Swedish girls and, suddenly, I wasn’t so tired. Five minutes later I was teaching them to skate outside on the street, holding them up so that they didn’t fall. For a pretty girl, you’ll do more than you are normally capable of, but on this occasion I was so tired I had to bid them adieu and head to bed. A few minutes later my door opened and my friend Nick burst into my room with a girl called Jo. Both of them were pretty drunk; I was sober as always, and really tired.

  But that strange euphoria a pretty girl triggers got me—Jo was a very cute brunette. And wouldn’t shut the hell up. She had seen me when I walked in and was annoyed that I had hit on the Swedish girls and not her so she got our mutual friend to come with her and burst in on me.

  I wasn’t complaining. I liked her, she was pretty, quirky and funny and we started talking about music. I played her some songs and it turned out we liked a lot of the same obscure randomness. Somehow, Nick ended up convincing me to take them and some others back to his place, so at 7 am there I was driving drunk people to another party. Hmmm.

  I lasted about an hour there and had to go home to sleep. At the time I was casually seeing a lovely English girl, but I knew straightaway that I liked this strange Australian girl more.

  Two months went by, Jo and I had talked on MySpace, the girl I was seeing had gone back to the UK and I was now free to pursue Jo. And I did. Apparently I was relentless, although I don’t remember that. I just knew that I liked her and I had a feeling that she liked me, too. All I wanted to do was hang out a bit and get to know her more. Pretty soon she relented and we both fell hard for each other.

  There was a problem. I had already booked my ticket and I would be home in two weeks—two days before Christmas. I had been partying and entertaining in bars for seven years and I was sick of it. I wanted to go home. This romance was intensified and condensed down to two weeks of magic. It was wonderful. The day I left Jo at Cairns airport was the hardest I’d ever had to endure.

  Back in Auckland I was lonely. Jo and I talked on the phone each day. And on MySpace. We sent each other little messages and pictures. Then one day when we were talking on the phone I said something silly: ‘Look, I think what we’ve got is pretty special, so I think that either I have to move back to Cairns or you have to move here.’ As soon as those words had left my mouth my stomach dropped a little. Damn, son, that was a big call. I’d never made such a big decision for another person before, especially a girl I’d only really been with for two weeks. Was I actually prepared to move back there for her? Yeah, when I thought about it I was prepared to move back there. I wanted to be with her.

  Jo worked about 123,412 hours per week at a really cool job for bugger-all money. And it was killing her. The discussion shifted to her moving to Auckland. She had no money at the time, owed a bit of money and couldn’t afford to move. Plus, it was a huge decision for a man she barely knew. I knew I wanted her here and I knew I didn’t want to go back to Cairns, so I put on my negotiating hat.

  ‘Here’s the deal, Jo. I’ll pay for your ticket over and I’ll even make it a return so that if it doesn’t work out with us you can get home no problem. We’ll stay with my parents at the start so we don’t have to pay rent, and I’ll cover any other costs that you need.’ Wow. What was I doing? Who knows? Who cares? It was only money and I really wanted to take a chance on this girl. I thought that it could become something quite special. Three weeks later I picked her up from the airport to start our new life together in Auckland. Awesome.

  The first few months were really tough. We discovered we were two strangers who had moved in together—into my parents’ house—and we were supposed to be in love. We fought, a lot—we both had really strong personalities and we both had firm opinions on things. It sucked. But we were also making it work and having fun. We both liked to go out, randomly. We liked a lot of the same things—music, movies and getting out and doing things. We would go on adventures so it was like having another Mr Mark Boyce, except this one had boobs and smelled pretty.

  Jo was awesome. She had so much love to give to me, to everyone. That was what I loved about her. Even if she had only a little bit of money she would be donating it to a charity. She was the one who would help you move house when no one else did. She was the one who would be around at people’s houses taking them soup if they were sick. What I am trying to say is that she was thoughtful, always. She was amazing to be around. It was also amazing to be the recipient of her love. It made me happy, very very happy.

  At the time I had saved a lot of money, but had no direction. Jo was working at a restaurant and I was trying to start a T-shirt business and organise more of my ridiculous events. Soon the money was running out, which started to cause some stress on me and between us. Being broke was a new experience for me and I hated it. I had to do something to change things, and on New Year’s Eve 2009 I flew back to Cairns for a job interview on 2 January. I got the job. I was the general manager of a new bar. A week later Jo was on a plane back to her hometown and we began settling into a gorgeous new apartment.

  Because I was making good money, Jo didn’t have to work, although she helped me out a bit at the bar. She was getting bored so she started going to the gym quite a lot, so much that people started to ask her for advice. She thought maybe this was a direction she could develop a career in. Maybe she could become a personal trainer.

  We’d been in Cairns for about a year when, one day, about 25 members of a motorcycle gang came into the bar and demanded to know where the owner was. They said he owed them a whole heap of money. While one big biker was interrogating me, another unzipped his trousers, flopped it out and started to piss all over the bar.

  I hadn’t seen the owner in a while and now I knew why.

  When he did come back he was full of conspiracy theories about his life and his businesses. Apparently, he’d had his house swept for bugs and had thrown out about a dozen cell phones because he was convinced that this was how they were tracking him. He thought people were stealing from him and said I was the only person he could trust. Then one day a friend of ours walked into his office and as she opened the door he pointed a loaded gun at her—he thought someone was coming to kill him. The incident freaked her the hell out and me, too. It could have been me, or Jo, and also he could have accidentally pulled the trigger. For some reason I can’t explain I still kept working there—maybe it was the good money, maybe I’m just stupid.

  As I said, I was the only person he trusted. He kept telling me that people were stealing from him, but I didn’t believe him. Still, I checked cameras, checked totals and made sure that all the staff members were above board. I had hired all of them, I loved all of them and I really didn’t think that anything untoward was going on.

  Every night I double-checked the totals, every night everything balanced and everything was accounted for. I put the money in the safe myself. Then the inevitable happened, as I knew it would. He had concluded that it wasn’t the staff stealing and it wasn’t him, so it must have been me. He was certain of it. I was the thief. Shit.

  I knew the guy from the bikie gang wanted something specific. I didn’t have it or know anything about it, but I could see in his eyes there were rational cogs turning and he was never going to do anything to me, so I wasn’t scared.

  This I was scared of. I had not stolen anything from my boss but he thought I had. There was no evidence to support his belief but I thought he was crazy and he had a loaded gun. Fuck this, I’m out. Come on, Jo, we’re going back to Auckland. We booke
d some tickets, gave notice on our apartment, and a week later we were gone.

  Two days before we left, the day of our leaving party, I went to Jo’s parents’ house and asked her father if he would let me take his daughter’s hand in marriage. He cried, I cried, he said yes, and I ran off to organise a proposal. I went to the kitchen and made a ring out of tinfoil, put it in my pocket and told Jo that we were going for a drive. We went up to the Crystal Cascades, a series of waterfalls in the rainforest just north of Cairns. We wandered through the forest but there were quite a few people around so I took her off the track. We walked down to the base of a waterfall and Jo thought I was taking her somewhere private so that I could have my way with her. It had crossed my mind, but I was here for a higher purpose. I got down on one knee, gave her my tinfoil ring and asked her to marry me. She was so shocked she nearly fell off the rock and down a cliff.

  Apart from that small hiccup, she was over the moon, said yes and was excited about telling everyone. She was surprised, although she already had a ring in mind. That wasn’t a secret! We drove back to Cairns to buy the ring. We got to the store, she put it on and it made her finger look fat or something like that so we had to find another one. It was 4 pm and we had to find something before the shops shut at 5 pm because all our friends would be at the party that night and they would all want to see her ring. You know what girls are like. So we raced around and found the perfect ring in the nick of time—it was 5 pm, the store was closing. All I had to do was pay for it.

  Declined. Yip, my card was declined. But I do! I do have enough. I’d made sure I moved the funds across. Then the cashier said, ‘Most cards have a daily spend limit, usually $500.’ Shit. I paid the $500. My credit card had about $2000 on it. I paid that. I was still well short. I called the bank and was told that I’d have to go into a branch to change the limit on my card and the banks were now closed. Shit. ‘Can I please please please please take it now and we’ll pay you the rest tomorrow? I promise!’ I begged the shop assistants, but they said no.