PART 5 THE PAINT SHOP

The year 1982 was a major ‘grow up’ year for me — and man, I really needed to. I’d turned 21, become married with a ready-made family of two, had my own rug rat on the way, had a house with a mortgage, and a business with a mortgage. Nothing like all that shit dripping off your shoulders to make you wake up and take a look at yourself.

I’d already figured that renting a shop was always going to be a dead end — of course, as you become older and wiser you become aware of the tax advantages associated with renting a shop, but I was neither older or wiser then — so in 1982, while running Stewart’s Auto-painting in Castlecliff’s Hinau Street, I borrowed up big and bought a house in Barrack Street, in the eastern suburb of Aramoho. It had an empty section beside it — because someone went to bed with a cigarette going and burned the house down — and I