Free Born to Fight by Mark Hunt, Ben Mckelvey

time. I took to poker machines like a duck to water. I was a kid in a new town, with few friends, no family and a lot of time on my hands. I’m not sure if you can draw a straight line between that feeling of escape I got when I first played video games as a kid, and me slumped on a pokie, pissing away my rent money, but both were similarly seductive.
    I don’t know, pokies just made sense to me, like video games had. I understood the parameters. I felt at home when I sat down. The difference between the two, though, was that I could usually stop playing video games when I wanted to. When I was playing video games, if I got hungry, I would eat, thirsty, I would drink; if I got tired, I stopped. That wasn’t the case with the pokies.
    I used to think I liked the pokies, but I know now I never liked them. I mean, how could I really like them? They never did anything for me except waste my time and empty my pockets. I don’t know, maybe I did like them at the beginning, but after a few weeks I was just addicted.
    Addiction is like a type of current that runs through your body, juicing you up, giving you a buzz, an energy. Energy you end up really loving. The only issue is, this current can’t run under its own power, it can only runfrom energy stolen from other parts of your life. That all seems okay at the time – take a little from here, a little from there – everything’s still running fine.
    Don’t worry about it. Everything else will work itself out.
You might tell yourself that your addiction is starting to fuck with your life. You’re drinking a bit too much, smoking too much, it’s costing you too much coin. You might say you’ll be paring that shit back – you might even mean it in that moment – but you’ll be back. It’s easy to get angry with an addiction, but it’s pretty hard to stay angry with one. Then, pretty soon, it’s rent day.
    I managed to keep up the gigs working doors, but the pokies meant I rarely kept up with the rent. After a few months George got sick of my broke ass and told his brother to kick me out. I had no place to go. I told Dave that, but his hands were tied. I understood; I was a shitty friend. It wasn’t like Dave and his bro were flush with cash either, and someone had to get money to the landlord.
    I left George’s place with all that I owned in a bag across my shoulder, and wondered what would happen next. I walked to the local shops and, while people walked past me, I thought about how there was cash in the pockets of every one of those fuckers. There was also cash in every store. If I wanted it, I could just go and grab it.
    I looked at an Indian man in his curry shop, stirring some bain-maries of food. I could be in and out of that shop in a flash, and there’d be money in my pockets. I’d been there before and I could easily go there again.
    What the fuck did this guy mean to me?
I realised then that he did mean something. Not a lot – I wasn’t yet well practised in the whole empathy thing – but he meant something. He did, and so did all those people walking past. They didn’t deserve me.
    I stuck my hands into my pockets and felt coins – two of them. Turns out I wasn’t completely broke: I still had two twenty-cent coins.
    I could see a phone booth. I picked up the receiver … who to call? I couldn’t think of anyone. I picked up the
White Pages
, opening it somewhere in the middle, where I found a listing for a halfway house. I phoned them before I knew what I was going to say. It was an Indian dude who answered.
    ‘Do you have any beds?’
    ‘Yes we do.’
    ‘I don’t have any money but … I really need a place to stay. I can give you the money in a week …’
    Of course he is going to tell me to go fuck myself. Of course he is
.
    ‘You can give it in one week?’
    ‘Yeah man, yeah. A week.’
    That was true, or at least it would be true if I could avoid chucking my wages into the pokies before getting them to this guy. He gave me the