Crazy Night with the Locals in Greymouth

April 13th, 2009 Filed under: Life | Tags: beer, randoms

Ok, you’ve probably already read my post about mine and Ivy’s Road Trip to Greymouth and are now wanting to know about the most insane night I have ever been witness too. It started off with Ivy and I meeting a local pair at the pub. I’ll refer to them as Sarah and James, (fake names for privacy reasons). Well we got to taking with Sarah and James and they seemed like a nice enough pair. After a a beer they said they were heading home before coming out to town again later that night. They invited us to come with them and since we had nothing better to do we decided to go with them.

We got to James house and met his mother and sister. We sat down in the lounge and started talking while having a few beers. It wasn’t long before a joint was lit up and started getting passed around. Now it seemed a little weird to me that this was happening with James mother and sister in the room, but his mum seemed fine with this. This is when things really started to get crazy. First the next door neighbour popped in to say Happy Easter she seemed like a nice enough girl but was complaining about trouble she has been having with an ex-boyfriend that has a book of her’s that she wanted back in exchange for some DVD’s of his that she has. When she left James and Sarah told us that they think she stole a large amount of drugs from her ex, and not just DVD’s. It seems they know the ex and he is known to grow weed. Not only that the neighour recently changed her whole appearance and contact details and seems to be in hiding.

This was enough to make me wonder where I was, but little did I know that this was just the beginning of a very crazy night. Next we started to hear about James’ story. James just had a baby with a girl he had been seeing for the last 4 years. He’s not to sure if the baby is his, but thinks it probably is. At the time of the birth he had a good job at a Tyre shop and they were living together with a workmate of his. Unfortunately, she wanted to be with her family so went up north and left him alone in Greymouth. This has caused him to hook into the weed a lot and he no longer has a job. He is also a boxer though and training for a fight in the next couple of weeks. James seemed like a guy that was going through a rough patch, but still kind of in control or at least trying to get himself out. Later in the night after a couple more beers he remembered something from earlier in the week that had pissed him off and was now angrily cursing to himself and muttering that he wanted to kill that guy. It was enough to freak me out quite a bit.

Now came James’ mum’s story. Turns out she is an ex alcoholic. Now remember all this time she has been drinking beer with us. But she told us it’s ok because she doesn’t buy any of her own liquor. Drinking James is fine because she knows she won’t get drunk because she won’t go buy her own. Oh and did I mention that she is seeing what they described as one of the biggest drug dealers on the Westcoast. Big enough that they wouldn’t mention his name and suggested that we don’t mention their names later. We also learnt that James’ mum had overdosed on pills a couple of times over the last decade. Some how this lead to the discovery that James’ sister was a lot younger that we originally thought. Somewhere in the early teens. This surprised us since she had been smoking pot with her brother the whole time.

Now during all this Sarah had been offering advise and support to the family. She seemed like the normal one of the group. (I use the word normal as a lack of a better one. We all have baggage, it’s just these guys had aired out theirs more than I was use to during a first meeting). That all changed when she mentioned that she was out drinking tonight because this was her last weekend before hitting rehab. She going to rehab to help herself stop drinking. During this conversation some mentioned that Sarah had just been released from jail after a five year term for killing a man. KILLING A MAN! I kept screaming that to myself while thinking what the fuck have we gotten ourselves into. Sarah was nice enough to realise that this snippet of info might be scaring us, so she elaborated on the story telling us that she had hit an elderly man while driving drunk when she was 17. This was nice to know, in the same way as it’s nice to know that the burning room your trapped in was accidentally lit.

It was at this point that we decided it would be in our best interest to hit the road. Lucky Ivy wasn’t drinking and could drive us the hell out of their and back to our hostel.

Just a note; James and Sarah are nice people that were cool enough to invite two outsiders (Ivy and I) over to their place after just meeting them an hour earlier in a pub. Plus they left us with a night we won’t soon forget.

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