FROG AND TOAD

==MY FIRST TATTOO==

“CHING, CHING”, arms raised up high and cheers erupt all around. I remember sliding back outside the circle of people so I could watch and absorb what a great time this was. Everyone was feeding off each others laughs and energy. Smiles, cuddles, rejoicing with distant family members, life long friends reliving stories of old it was fantastic, moments later…………”BANG”.

But before I get ahead of myself I should set the stage for all who are reading. I was in Noosa, North Queensland Australia, and The event- The wedding of Lisa Russell and Jamie Paske. Noosa for those who haven’ been there is simply describe as stunning, perched on the coast line of Queensland and ocean to be seen in all directions, I fell in love with the place instantly.

The wedding itself was held on small grassy plane on the top of a high cliff over looking the ocean, the weather was warm and sun sat over our heads like a light bulb and every now and again the ocean would blow a breathe of cool breeze into out faces.
Its weird how nothing needs to be said to know how everyone around you were feeling, there was a wealth of energy released from our bodies. Even for the people who were having hard times at home and if it was for only a moment it lifted there cradles of cloud over there heads and bring a smirk to there face.

2 silhouettes stand hand in hand on top of the world and all around admiring there wealth grown by love. Both together in front of that vast sheet of Blue Ocean alone was a message from them to us saying nothing else matters but there relationship together.
I have to say from the heart, there was no beauty on the day that could have stood near the Angel named Lisa. If you were to take a photo above us all im sure all heads would have been pointing towards her, it was criminal to take your eyes away from her.

“You may kiss the bride”, I bet at this point the priest was thinking “Jamie you lucky sod”. Lips meet and Silence was broken from a huge “HORAY”. A perfect day had drawn to and end for two amazing people.
It’s the events that happened prior to this amazing day that hit my life to the core forever………. “CHING, CHING”, arms raised up high and cheers erupt all around. I remember sliding back outside the circle of people so I could watch all and absorb what a great time this was. Everyone was feeding off each others laughs and energy. Smiles, cuddles, rejoicing with distant family members, life long friends reliving stories of old it was fantastic and moments later…………”BANG”.

This bang resembled a somewhat of a bomb going off. All oxygen around us was engulfed with huge gasps of fright. The Bali bombings hit Australia hard and this “BANG” happened not long after it so everyone was still on edge, naturally.
We all started running towards the origin of the bang, I always imagined I would run away from something so loud not towards it. I sprinted so fast my legs weren’t a part of my body to reach the scene. I and a couple others who were the first to arrive at a destination of destruction, but it weren’t caused by a bomb but 2 cars colliding at high speeds.
One car remained in the middle of the road with steam rising from its engine; the other was about 30meters away rocking on its roof. I stood still for a moment to gather my thoughts before heading into the mess.

By the stroke of luck 2 people who were related to the bride were paramedics and dove straight in to help and I with very limited experience in first aid followed. That little pause I took to gather my thought before entering never could have prepared me for the horror I was getting involved in.We got to the first car and looked inside, I couldn’t see anyone, and it amazed me and than I looked harder and there was someone in there. She must have got hit so hard that the engine which was now on her lap and had pushed her into the back seat. She was in a very serious condition.

I was told I couldn’t help here so I moved to the next car and this picture I will never forget….. My first words when I looked inside the over turned Astra were “FUCK ME”. It looked like a butchery of hanging bodies. Lifeless limbs dangled upside because the seat belts were holding them there.A 3 inch thick pool of blood rested on the inside of the ceiling which was now the floor. A street lamp shone a bright light into the vehicle and over the pool of blood; you could see the stream of liquid leaving there bodies to hit the already full roof, very similar to watching a leaking tap drip into a bucket.

“OOOOOOHHHHHH”, came from within, someone was conscience and reached his arm to me. “Hey man, you alright?” thinking back now, what a fucking stupid question. He couldn’t reply with words but with moans and groans. He hung upside down still with his close friends next to him; I’d hate to imagine what fear would have riddled his body for the safety of his friends.
I don’t remember in the frantic mess who was with me at the time helping but we somehow managed and unbuckled this poor lad’s belt, he fell to the roof with a thud and a mighty groan of agony. He slowly crawled out of the window looking back quite frequently at his friend’s motionless bodies and shook his head at the ground and started crying.

I know more than anything and I mean this with all sincerity at how important my friends are to me, they are my life and I thank them for the person I am today, so its hard because it nearly puts me in tears to think what it must have been like for him to see his friends in such a state
We both collapsed next to each other and he grabbed me so tight and threw his head into my shoulder, only raising it to look back at the destruction lying only a meter away from us.

I remember hearing someone with calming words who had came over to me and said “Nath I need to look at him, help me mate”; it was one of the paramedics. I asked the lad to raise his head so we could have a look at him and he did well to do that. All questions were asked to see if he had sustained any large injuries but to me he looked fine considering the bent, twisted steel he crawled out of. More and more questions were asked and he said no to all of them, and than he said “But i have this really cold chill going up the side of my neck” , I had the same feeling but mine was threw my spine and that was due to fear.

Before we could ask for him to turn his head for us to examine, it was already done, and before I was ready my body had gone from enduring a spine chill to much worst, I was frozen stiff. It’s quite stunning to think what a powerful engine the brain really is, and my engine had just suffered a massive power overload, the reason being was butterflies wings. Have you ever noticed how hypnotic it is to watch a butterfly open and close its wings while resting on a flower? I have and it best describes how I felt watching this boy’s laceration open and close on his neck as he turned it, just not as beautiful, obviously!

I understand that for some it was just a gash or minor wound but to me it was much more. I saw tendons, veins, deep holes, and all colours like blue and white. It was more than enough for the average eye to see in such a quick instant. Nether the less the problem had to be sorted and I was now in charge of looking after him while the others, who I think were in a much serious condition, were tended to.
We asked him to put pressure on his neck while we waited for the ambulance to arrive. Its funny, I think we all seem so complaisant about how we spend our lives and what we do with the time we have but when it’s in such a delicate state as this, every second is so crucial and waiting for this ambulance to arrive was like pulling teeth.

Time came and went and still there were no sight of red and blue flashing lights coming over the hill and reality as it always does was starting to hit my new battered friend at the wrong time. I hate that fucking word, ‘REALITY’, because there is never any any end to it. Soon as you think you’re living a life that fights in the category of normal something like this gives you a cold hard slap to stay “no wait there’s more to come”.

We were soon asked to move from were we were sitting and fare enough to because 1 meter away were the bodies of 4 young men hanging upside down in a car wreck and I had the only conscience lad right next to me, the last thing they need was for this kid to flip out and dive back in there to help them, so we both stood up and walk around the wreck to sit in the gutter.I kept the lad on my right because the upside down car was on my left, and lucky to cause as we walked past it I looked down to the site of a body laid out on the grass and people hovering over him, he must have been the driver. I presumed the body was thrown out the window due to the many flips they endured; he mustn’t have been wearing his seat belt.

We both sat up the road and talked awhile, trying to divert our thoughts from the anarchy behind us, Iy didn’t work. Every now and again he would jump up and look at what was going on and if he could help and that this stage, I STILL, didn’t know how bad this guys wound was until the ambulance finally turned up.

One thing that does stick in my mind, as well as everything else, isafter the ambulance arrived we got to sit in the back under the lights while they helped the others in the cars. The kid looked at me and said, “I’m worried man, but thank you”. I didn’t really think I deserved it considering the others out there were actually saving lives but I was thankful none the less.

A Paramedic finally got the chance to tend to my friend, he brought out his little flash light, looked into his eyes asked im a few questions before I could butt in and tell him he had quite decent cut on his neck and it should probably have a look at it, he did. The boy peeled back his hand away from the already drying blood to reveal a wide open wound which resembled a screaming mouth. The paramedic’s reaction was similar to mine, the boy asked if he needed to go to hospital and the doctor said “right this instant”. I was soon asked to hop out of the Ambulance, I said goodbye to someone ill never meet again but shared such a crazy moment together and will never forget. The sirens started again and he was off.

I stood there in the middle of the street watching everything going on around me, people ran past me like I was a ghost, like I wasn’t even there. It was inspiring to see gifted paramedics doing there all to save someone’s life, but not all were saved.
The lady in the car had suffered massive head injuries and died in the back seat of her car and the young lad that was flown out of the window also died from massive haemorrhaging to his abdominals.

I wandered away from the wreckage in a daze, looking ahead, eyes wide open. I pasted people in the street but no one’s faces registered to my memory, at that time I didn’t have a memory apart from the one that was just drowned into my mind. I didn’t realise at the time but all these people I was walking past happened to be my family and one in particular stopped me, it was my mum. She had nothing to say because she saw the expression on my face and she knew she couldn’t do anything now but give me a hug and walk me home. ~To end all I have to say is, ‘I have many tattoo’s but none of them are on my skin‘!!

====BUDAPEST BADBOYS====

End of the week, 48 hours of Mind numbing bar work under my belt and many frowns along the way to accompany them and than the phone rings, Its my best mate Mick, my frown is now upside down….. “ ahhhhh Champion how’s things?”, “yeah good man good, listen I had an idea the other day”, he says!!

Now that sentence alone sends chills down my spine...........“ ha, really Mick, keep talking”. I was thinking about a trip to Budapest, what do you reckon??”. It took me a world record time at 2 seconds to make my decision, “IM IN”, I now think maybe I should put more thought into things.
The date finally arrives and before a dog could piss on your boot I was boarding a easy jet flight to the unknown and unstudied Budapest, this later on you will see at being our downfall. Man even when I write this I’m taking deep anxious breathes because I know what’s to come.

Tires hit the deck with a screech, the hot air hostess thanks us for flying with them a hopes we enjoy our stay in Budapest, ha, did we fucking what. Our spirits were high as grandma’s undies, walking around with grins from ear to bloody ear.
“ Now first things first, BEER”. The one thing I do love about Eastern Europe is the price of beer, its cheap and good to, minus the fact they put a 10 inch head on it. While in the taxi to our hotel we started thinking up a game plan for the evenings activities, now I forgot to mention that Mick had brought one of his mates from up north with him but for the life of me I cant remember his name so we’ll call ‘Wilbur’ for humors sake.

Wilbur thought seeing it’s a boys weekend away from the Mrs.’s, if we had any, that we should drop our bags off, get in a taxi and head to a nice ladies bar, ha look at me trying to soften things up by calling a ladies bar cause I’ve probably got family reading this, alright it’s a strip club. We all agreed that that was a pisser off an idea, I even extended a high 5 for his great efforts and he left me hanging, I made note never to attempt a high 5 with Wilbur again.
Ok…..Hotel…..check, bags……check, Room…….check……..the room smelling like a rotting dag off big foots ass…….check. Oh my lordy did it smell. I did a hot fart in my sisters pillow once that smelt very similar, ha, that sucker stayed in there for a week to…..I was so proud!!

So I and my mate Mick sat patiently while Wilbur nicely and calmly ripped the jugular out of the hotel manager’s throat because we now smelt like a bums big toe. All things got sorted we were shipped to another hotel, we’ll not exactly, we noticed the spelling of the hotel had changed at the new one, it contained a ‘S’ in the middle. It said Hostel, and a shit tip at that, and trust me Wilbur had the jugular from the last bloke still in his hand I was dreading to see what he was going to do to the next pale European. We decided to bite our Aussie lips and just be happy we don’t have to sleep in poo aroma palace.

Ooooh now were getting down to the nitty gritty……… “TAXI”…….” hello mate could you please take us nice smelly men to a ladies bar??”””……..”Absolutely my friends, hop in hop in, I now very good bar, very good bar”.
Something about this bloke wasn’t sitting well in my belly, it could have been that I had a big turd on delivery but I was happy to point the finger at him to blame. The cars pulls up the establishment and I noticed as we got out that the driver gave the door men a nice sneaky hand wave, similar to my high five but the driver wasn’t left hanging, im still bitter.

In all honesty the place was nice, not very well lit up but classy all the same. There were round booths like the old style 60’s café’s, covered in red material. No lights were on inside except for the spot lights above the booths which added to the seedy charm, if that’s even possible.

As I write this my y anxious breathes are getting worse, and Mick mate if your reading this I’m sure yours are as well.
As soon as we set foot onto that red carpet we were there’s and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it. The club was completely empty, not a soul expect for the big bald headed bastards that looked like a larger version of angry Anderson guarding the doors and this little mouthy bastard that was running the show.

He was very well dressed, spoke very good English and he was ESPECIALLY polite to us, making us feel like Aussie royalty with big shlongs, but the bloke was tiny, I mean I nearly sat on him at the bar cause I thought he was a stool. He showed us to a booth right up the front of the stage were the girls dance.

He flashed a drinks menu pass my already bulging eyes because of the women with 5 story pins who had just entered the stage. The show started, legs going here, hair flying there, Mick drooling to my left and Wilbur whimpering like a poodle on heat to my right. I can’t even begin to search for words to describe how beautiful these women were………my jaw still hasn’t fully recovered from hitting the table at such force!

As the night progressed the 3 muts-in-tears necked beers beers left, right and were its suppose to go centre. Laughs and giggles were had all round and for a good while I was even thinking of having a second high 5 attempt, but events were to change quite dramatically.

The girls come and sat with us awhile, talked, showed there boobs here and there while we bought more drinks here and there. They ordered small coke size bottles of champagne, wine and all sorts and in my true drinking order I went from beers to downing white rabbits, in lamens terms that’s Jim beam and coke. We saw enough boob that night than Hugh Hefner had in a life time so decided to conceal our woodys and leave but a small matter had to be erected, (nice choice of words your saying right now right??) THE BILL!!

We gave old mate bar stool the cheque signal, something I’ve always wanted to do and he was over in a jiffy. I still had my cheesy grin on but that was soon cleaned right off when I opened the bill……….these words came to .f%£K, C~£T, and so on and so on. 180,000 forint. My bum hole puckered up to the size of a pin head.

I had to stand to read the bill properly, and I couldn’t exactly figure out how much it was in pounds so I had to pull Mick’s nose out of some boobs to help me, he looked at the bill and said in these exact words, “fuck Nath, that’s 1200 quid.” this sum was actually comical to us so we went back to bar stool bloke and said “mate I think there’s to many zeros on this bill can you check it again for us?”, but no dice….this was the real price.

At first we said we weren’t going to pay this sum but that argument soon dwindled when the heavies packing heat at the door intervened. All three of us were pulled aside to sort out a payment plan, we weren’t leaving until this was done. We had probably about £200 on us in there; we only needed another £1000 more. Can you believe it? £1200 quid for 16 or so drinks. Things started to get REALLY tense in there, the girls were told to leave us and we were under guard at all times. I remember asking one of the girls before she was rushed away….”what happens if we don’t pay?, cause im pretty sure we wont get our hands on that amount”, all she could say was, “they’ll hurt you”……..

A gigantic explosion of fear poisoned my body stiff when she said that. Looking around the table, under that suspect spot light, the boys fear were showing there fears externally as well. Big round eyes, grim faces and you new there minds were racing around looking for answers, but there wasn’t any to find cause all the fear was clouding all thought processes possible. Than out of nowhere I was grabbed by the arm and lead away from the table, I gave one last glance back to the lads and I was gone, down the hallway , out the front where there was a car waiting.

This was becoming to surreal for me to deal with mentally, I really was petrified. Budapest at night is not a friendly looking place, tall grey buildings, no street lights, grim people walking the streets and me in the back of a car with 2 guys who were most probably going to hurt me bad or even kill me. I was still searching for solutions to this mammoth problem and one came to mind, when the car stops jump out and run like buggery, I had some pace and bar stool wasn’t going to catch me but than I thought these guys aren’t dumb that’s why they didn’t bring all 3 of us at once, Mick and Wilbur were hostages until I get back and if I don’t return, there fucked.

The car took a hard turn into a pitch black alley and stopped. This was the moment I had to make my decision. Bar stool unlocked the central locking and told me to stand outside the car and to wait, I did so, I didn’t run. The time it took bar stool to get out of the car felt longer than life itself. I couldn’t understand what they were talking about in the car, ways of killing me, what to do if I run, all of this shit went threw my head.

I looked around and all I could see was blackness, if anything was to happen here no one would know, not even my family knew I was in Budapest that’s how unprepared we were for this trip. I heard the car door open; I stared straight ahead as the foot steps on the pavement got closer. My heart was breaking threw chest with every beat, things went quite for a moment and that’s when I thought, “ this is it”. he’s probably behind me with a gun pointed at my head, I was wrong.

He pushed me forward and told me to enter a sort of derelict building, inside there was a ATM, of all places to have one as well. He pulled out all of my cards and took everything I had, I think it was something like £350 to £400. He even tried to get money at of my forklift license. So it was done, he didn’t kill me but rinsed my bank account. They took me back and I noticed soon as I walked in that the boys had been moved to another table at the back of the club and under guard. I also noticed this weather beaten haggard woman.

She had an evil face and would frighten even Steve Erwin, I came to think later that she’s probably the owner and was told that they had a group of lads who don’t have money to pay. When I sat down with the boys I was riddled with questions about where I had been, what they did to me and so on, I told them everything when I had the courage to lift my head to eye level. Mick was next to be taken, he was gone for the same amount of time as me, about 20 to 30mins. He came back with his nose pointing to the ground as well.

Wilbur was the 3rd and final person to go but what made him different from me and Mick was, we were only gone for 30mins at the most. He was gone for hour a half. This really shook our boots. Me and Mick both looked at each other with worry and talked about how much we had given them so far and how much Wilbur needed to produce to get the full payment, it was quite a bit.

Minutes kept on ticking over and our nerves were building to breaking point. We conjured up a theory for the reason why he had been gone so much longer than us, he didn’t produce the remainder of the money and was being sorted out. What a terrible thought that is to have about a mate. Me and Mick couldn’t stand it any longer and decided to make a run for it if he was back in the next 10mins. We didn’t know what they would do if we tried but it was worth the risk.

We got to the final minutes of our countdown and who walks in, Wilbur and what a relief it was to. He was actually smiling to. He sat down and said that the bloke had taken him to an all night bank after making a pit stop at our hostel to get our details from our passports. And said not to inform the police because they will do nothing, they even had the hide give us a complimentary drink at the end of it all.

The thing that really pisses me off is as we were walking out in a withering mess and near tears, fucking barstool had a cheeky grin on his face and thanked us for coming and goodbye and take care as if we were shopping in a clothes store or something and that customer service actually mattered, little prick!! We finally left the establishment an went looking for a ATM to see if we could get any money out at all, we found one and as we were trying to get money out a guy came up behind me and was sobbing like crazy, literally crying his heart out.

I turned around and asked if he was ok, he couldn’t answer under so much emotion so I looked over his shoulder and who do you think was there??? Barstool with is ear to ear grin, this poor lad had just been done like us. We managed to get some money and see the next 2 days out in Budapest, they weren’t great. We couldn’t get on that plane quick enough and finally when I got home I realized half my body had pins and needles in it, as if it was numb.

I later went to the doctors and he told me that I had suffered a massive hyperventilation attack and it had caused minor nerve damage, I got the week off work but it took months for me to feel normal again. I’ve recently been back to Budapest for a music festival and happened to stumble across the club in day light, I was lost for words.

After a night at the festival we were walking back home when this bloke came up to us shaking his head, I asked what was wrong and soon as he said “TAXI” I knew were the rest of his story was leading. All he wanted to do was see a Hungarian bar, this taxi driver took him to this club, the same club mind you, he had 1 beer and they charged him 40euros for it, he refused to pay so they beat the shit out of him and took him for 140euros instead. His taxi driver was corrupt just like ours.

On my last trip I did realize how beautiful Budapest really is and how this shouldn’t shadow it dark cloud for everyone else but after that experience there will always be a dark cloud in my mind when it comes to hungry