THE OUTCAST TRIBE

UNDER STREETLIGHTS THEY’RE in every small town and city suburb, groups of young males getting together, on the outer margins of the marginalised, the worst attracted to their ilk, predator birds of a feather, mindless — since minds aren’t needed when males of this type are together, young (and afflicted) like this.

You simply join up to become a single physical experience and wallow in what happens to you, being together in heartless numbers like this. Oh, and it’s the numbers, the sense of invincibility, the sense that you are not alone in your real darkness, down in the vaults where unexplained anger rules. And it’s the night gives you ownership (of yourself, the true, awful you), the beautiful bad night, better if they’re streetlights, not in the main street where the youths hang out conspicuously easy for the cops to pick, too public, too well lit for you, the lurking monster waiting, aching to express yourself.

It’s the suburban shopping mall, or within eyeshot but not too close, of a busy pub, since your prospective victims emerge drunk, unknowing, unwitting to you waiting lurkers. You, murderers waiting to fulfil your genetic destiny. Unless it’s of an upbringing so bad you got no choice, and nor then does society.

You hang out and roam around, looking, always looking, for action to happen; if it takes too long in happening, the very worst of you, those who can’t wait for destiny to declare itself in a blaze of violent, unlawful glory, make a decision you’re bank robbers, or specialise in all-night service stations, so you steal guns, steal a car, take your crude plan to a bank you’ve chosen and look, there’s the sweet headline: Bank Teller Shot at Point Blank Range. Such description lifts you into the stratosphere.

Every once in a regular while one or three of your number disappears to do their inevitable life sentence in a max-security jail, testimony to your dangerous status. The ever-replenishing group of you have names of jailed dudes you admire, wanna be like, emulate, mirror their terrible existence. Dudes doing minimum seventeen years (oh man, how big a status is that!) for wasting two, three citizens; taking two, three lives. The bunch of you sitting around reading the newspaper court page, laughing, wide-eyed in admiration and glee at hearing your buddy’s recorded words in police custody as saying he felt nothing wasting some dude’s life away — laughing. Beside yourselves with pride at this dude you’ve been hanging out with, the élite club he’s joined: Murderer with a capital M, bro.

Or the destiny stumbles your way, like a blind man, unaware, into the oozing reaches of you, the collective beast. Not one thought has come from you, not any, or none that a youth’d own up to for he can’t, he’d be a real outcast, cast out from the outcasts, and that would be the ultimate rejection, would it not? Ain’t what society thinks ’cos you ain’t part of them. It’s your — everyone’s — peers.

Though from time to time you lose those who see they can’t go as far as you, the heartless hardcores, can and will. Gone, often to another town, never to be acknowledged by you again. Spat on if they should ever see you. Beat up if you get the chance. The ultimate in failures in your eyes: young men who refuse to go that whole destined way and do murder.

Under the streetlights and the lights from the hulks of shopping mall, which feel like a ship you kind of belong to, anchored there in the night under the stars, the moon usually in some form up there, cool-az when it’s full, not in terms of beauty or weight of galactical meaning; it just feels like the meaning of your danger together, bad-intentioned like this. Feels like a good reason, scientifically so it’s said, for you to go mad. Just as soon as the dumb innocent blind drunk man comes lurching your way, or a woman whose face has no connections in this area, to rape, sodomise, beat to death if it’s not her lucky night. Just as soon as that happens.

It’s dangerous and yet laughter and nervous chuckles and outbreaks of bravado disguised as laughing come from you. Of you the tribe member, an individual nothing who is yet desperately, pathologically out to prove himself a necessarily staunch, rugged, dangerous individual.

You who have separated yourselves off from the main flock. Or the main hunting pack. For you hunt a different prey for quite different reason: not to feed hunger, or even a sense of doing something. But to satisfy this clear and specific need in you that says: I must do harm to someone, anyone. Serious harm. The ultimate harm. That’s what it says. That’s what you are.

Most of the girls melt off, or they get dragged off for a quick venting, a quick dip, the ones who stay around are themselves of the same physical, mindless beast. They’re head-kickers and female high-pitch screamers down at the victim, who represents to them what it does to you, the boys, the guys, the fullas, the dudes: your pain becomes his effin’ pain. Eff him a thousand times over. Tell yourselves the victim provoked this. He brought it on himself. That anything you do is justified or else it isn’t but doesn’t have to be. Hey? Is that one coming across the park?

Is that one fumbling with his car keys? Hey? He shouldn’t be driving, he’s drunk. Hahahaha! Hey? What’s he doing hanging around in a park? I bet he’s a pervo, a effin’ child molester, a homo (never a homo sapiens entitled to exist in as drunk a state as he chooses. We all have our devils, monkeys riding on our damned backs, burdens that drink helps shoulder, situations at home less than satisfactory, pasts that have to be kept in a state of stupor so they don’t tear us completely apart. We all have that).

Just existing in this circumstance, this proximity to the outcast tribe, is ill-fated and ill-judged enough. Hey, bud! Hey, you! The eff you doin’, man? Oh, hear the pitter patter of feet, shoes running across the street, no sound quite like it. No sight, not under streetlight how every third moment seems snatched away by the night and so it’s all slowed down. Movement. Intent. Who you all are. What you’re gathered here to become. No, not become. You’re already that.

What you’re all here to let out of yourself, the each of you who are the singular beast about to go for the prey. You were already that. Or else youths your age would be out in their vast numbers everywhere. And they’re not, are they? Just you. Maori youths. Not white youths. They’ve evolved past mindless murder in packs like this. Maori youths. Not all Maori youths — you lot. Your kind of Maori youth.