A brief history of beating up Steve Braunias

And then there was the time I was drinking in my regular bar and got punched in the face by a guy everyone called Chief, partly out of respect, mainly because that was his job title. He was in senior management. He was the head of a street gang. He was also a very likeable and affable guy who enjoyed the company of his palagi friends. When crossed, though, he was a terror.
I said something wrong. I argued a point. Never a good idea after a certain time of day and this was in that strange, tense, unpredictable no-man’s-land of around 8pm, when you’ve got three good hours of drinking behind you and looking forward to the downill slopes of three good hours of drinking ahead of you. The half-way point can mark a delicate balance. The remark was neither provocative or scornful, and it was over some completely forgotten minor issue, but any kind of disagreement can be taken as a wero and the Chief never backed away from a challenge. Anyway, he punched me in the face.
I was sitting on a bar stool and was so surprised that I didn’t fly off it from the force of his fist  that I laughed. He had only given me a light tap. Laughing was another bad idea and he charged forward to deliver another, stronger blow but someone intervened and that’s when all hell broke loose. A couple of other drinkers got whacked and a third got thrown down the stairs. The Chief eventually had enough, and left. A couple of us took a taxi to A & E just to make sure nothing was broken, and when I flew to Wellington the next morning to appear on the Kim Hill radio show, I wore a massive pair of sunglasses to hide the damage. “Please take them off while I’m talking to you, Stephen,” Kim said. I did as I was told, and complied once again when she hastily ordered me to put them back on. Not a pretty sight.
But apart from the occasional other, less dramatic hiding, that was probably the only time in 64 years of soft living where I was in any kind of danger. I’m not built for it. I like keeping out of trouble and staying at home to feed the cats and water my amazing collection of houseplants. Like many people, I have no personal, lived knowledge about life on the streets or what goes on in situations where a gun or a pair of fists are required. Like many people, though, I take an avid interest in these subjects, these different ways of New Zealand life, to the extent that I regularly write about crime and criminal trials.
My third collection of these true-crime literatures, The Survivors: Stories of Death and Desperation, has just been published. Third, and final; I have been making a song and dance these past few weeks on the publicity trial – early in the morning to Jenny-May Clarkson on Breakfast, late in the evening to Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights – about writing no more books of this kind, that this marks the end of the road.
I’ll still cover the occasional trial for the Herald. In fact right this second, Monday morning July 29, I’m at the High Court of Auckland to cover a trial for the Herald, and will probably stay there for much of the next six weeks … But I’m done with having to go the extra distance of thinking, and writing, and styling some kind of structure and narrative for a book. Basically I no longer possess the mental stamina needed to turn murder trials into a book. The Survivors marks the end. I’d rather be the author of some other kind of subject. That’s all there is to it but I’ve not succeeded in getting this point across; instead, people think that I’m quitting because covering murder trials finally got too much, that they inflicted some kind of psychic damage, that their sagas of death and misery were brutalising.
It’s not the case. The closest resemblance to any particular aversion is that I began to feel estranged from the subject. Chapters in The Survivors include one about the bad guy who shot and killed a police officer, one about the bad guy who shot and killed a drug dealer, and one about the bad guy who murdered a baby … I was a stranger in their world. I had been in too few fights.
It oughtn’t matter, or make any difference; we don’t choose judges or criminal lawyers on the basis of their fight record, although maybe that might be a good thing. I write about crime because it’s interesting, and tragic, and sometimes beautiful. I think the stories in The Survivors are among the best things I’ve ever written. I brought whatever little expertise I have in journalism to these trials – but I didn’t bring an understanding of the violence of the cases, and maybe that does matter, does make a difference.
Hardly any authors come from the streets. One of the few in New Zealand was Bill Payne. He started writing in Rimutaka Prison where he was serving a four-year sentence for importing A-class drugs. He came under the expert literary care of author Fiona Kidman; encouraged, given a chance, he wrote two books, Staunch (1988), a non-fiction study of gangs, and the short story collection Poor Behaviour (1994). He won the Louis Johnson Writer’s Bursary in 1992 and the Frank Sargeson Fellowship in 1993.
We were friends. We drank in the same bar. He was there the night the Chief erupted. He set up peace talks a week or so later, and that led to an invitation to a Xmas party held by the Chief’s gang. It was out near the airport. Everyone was very welcoming, and passed around a flagon containing liquid speed.
Bill was totally at ease. He knew his way around violence. Tall, gaunt, slow-moving, infinitely cool and a warm friend, he valued loyalty above all things. Hep C and the chaos of the needle did for him, and he had a liver transplant in late 2004. It didn’t take. I visited him in hospice. He was unable to talk. He died on September 1, 2005. Bill was 53. He was the real deal and there’s no way I wanted to change places. 
The Survivors: Stories of Death and Desperation by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins, $37.99), number six in the latest Nielsen BookScan bestseller chart, is available in bookstores nationwide.