I'm Brian. I'm an American, but don't hold that against me. Before I walked 2,200 miles to get here to Maine, I lived in Perth, Australia for a year. In March of 2007, this really happened:

I returned to Perth after my final semester teaching in Thailand while Scott and Clare were on their honeymoon, so I volunteered to house-sit for a couple weeks while I looked for a place of my own. The economy in Perth was booming, on account of the burgeoning mining industry in Western Australia's interior, and so housing was hard to come by. I remember a newspaper article that said rental vacancies were at a 20-year low, less than a 1% vacancy rate. This presented a bit of a challenge for the meager Third World paycheck I brought with me.

After several fruitless weeks of searching for a room, I finally had a bite. It wasn't pretty, but since someone else called the landlord with an enquiry while he was showing me the shithole, I took it. There was a whole menagerie of cretins, swine and non-English speakers crammed into that house, but I was lucky enough to have a room of my own.

Two of my roommates were named Kevin and Richard. They were both from New Zealand, about 50 years old, and incorrigible, raging alcoholics. Richard was a crusty old Navy guy and a repressed homosexual with the most disgusting toes I've ever seen. Kevin was a Maori I could barely understand. When I met him he stuck out his hand and said, "I'm Kevin, Maori from New Zealand." I said, "I'm Brian, white guy from America." That was a memorable handshake.

Not long after on a Friday night I was walking home from the train station when I saw Kevin in the beer garden of a local pub, so I decided to join him. It wasn't until I grabbed a pint and sat down that I realized he was passed out in a seated position. Obviously there wasn't much conversation between us, so to make things less awkward, I took out my phone and pretended to have important calls while I steadily drew from my pint.

Soon Richard came back to the table, announcing that he had ordered a pizza and we would all go pick it up and bring it home. He was slightly less drunk than Kevin. He didn't acknowledge my arrival, because I don't think he realized that I wasn't there all night long. Getting to the car was an ordeal for these two. Kevin had to be woken up, and I'm not sure how Richard dialed the number for the pizza, he could hardly get one foot in front of the other.

Due to this, I faced a dilemma that I hope you can relate to. There's no doubt I was in better shape than them, but I'd consumed a few drinks myself. It was never my plan to drive anywhere that night, but these two were carrying each other along like wounded athletes trying to get off the field. Arm-in-arm, I take one step, you take one step, "We'll just get to the locker room and everything will be OK." I pointed out the struggle they were having getting to the car and offered to drive.

"It's a stick shift, young man. Can you drive a stick shift?" Richard asked.

"Yes."

"Now, the clutch is loose so you have to... do you know how to use a clutch?"

"Yes."

"Just make sure to take off the parking brake, because this is a manual transmission. Wait, can you..."

"Give me the fucking keys."

The Kiwis got in the back seat together as I fumbled with the ignition. When I looked up in the rearview, they had each other in headlocks and were throwing punches — hard. "This is gonna' be some ride," I thought. To get out of the parking spot, I had to reverse uphill and make a sharp cut, while avoiding the cars on either side and not rolling forward into the beer garden fence... while using this man's clutch for the first time... with the car rocking side to side because these two were now full-on brawling in the back seat.

I was almost out of the parking lot when a head smashed against my seat and a foot came to rest on my shoulder. "This might be a bit much for the open road," I said. I pulled into another spot and the two of them spilled out of the car and kept scrapping in the parking lot next to a bottle shop.

I didn't know what to do, so I sat on the hood and watched. A car pulled up next to me and asked if everything was OK. I didn't know what to say, so we both just watched as the fight unfolded. It was clear now that Kevin was the dominant one, he even had time to walk over to our new friend, hand him his wristwatch, advise him to "Never fuck with a Maori," and get back to the shit before Richard even stood up. It was all over after that. Richard got knocked out and Kevin went looking for his watch. The guy tossed it to me and drove off. While we were waiting for Richard to wake up, instead of offering up more pro-Maori propaganda, Kevin was now talking about his wristwatch. He asked me if I thought it was nice. Of course I said that it was.

To top it all off, I should mention that Kevin — the 50-ish New Zealand Maori who just beat his countryman unconscious — has no fingers on his punching hand. He lost them all in an industrial accident a few years earlier. He just has a thumb and a palm. I call him The Maori Mallet.

Welcome to Perth.

Brian Spigel is a reformed world traveler based in Portland, Maine, USA. After stints in various American national parks, Antarctica, Thailand, Australia, and the Appalachian Trail, he is currently attempting to live a so-called normal life in Portland.