by Dom Harvey
‘Yeah, we can try it,’ Kaino replied without even leaving a courtesy pause or giving my upper body a quick inspection to see exactly what he was about to do battle with. Never mind. I was not offended by his blatant lack of respect.
‘In the unlikely event that I beat you, what do I get?’ I asked, hoping he might put a jersey or some tickets to the World Cup final on the line.
Kaino paused for a second, then replied, ‘You’ll get a free beer.’
A Steinlager representative laughed. This would be one voucher for a complimentary beer he probably wouldn’t have to hand out.
We both got ourselves in position on opposite sides of a bar leaner as a small crowd gathered around. Among the crowd were press photographers, TV journalists with camera crews in tow, some customers who just happened to have stopped by for a couple of quiets on the way home and my co-hosts on The Edge breakfast show, Jay-Jay Feeney and Mike Puru, who were recording the entire event with audio and video equipment, knowing there was a high probability something that had the potential to go viral on YouTube was about to commence.
Jerome and I linked hands on the tabletop. I took a few seconds to pivot my feet on the ground and position my elbow on the table. I can’t say for sure if Jerome did the same pre-wrestle routine; I was too busy worrying about myself to take any notice of what he was doing. With members of the media circling about like hungry sharks, the last thing I wanted was a one-second slam-down. A loss was expected but if I could keep my hand away from the beer-stained tabletop for at least a few seconds, I would walk away looking like only a partial idiot.
Then my co-hosts kicked us off: ‘Okay, you guys both ready? Annnd GO!’
Immediately, I could feel the pressure of this huge fist and forearm bearing down on me but I managed to hold my own and stay alive. After three seconds we were back in the start position and dead even. Already, this was a victory as far as I was concerned. From here in, every single second was a bonus point. I was shocked and slightly perplexed by my awesomeness, so in a strained voice I had to ask the question: ‘I’m trying my best. Are you trying your best?’
Laughing, he replied, ‘Hell yeah! I’m trying.’ That was confusing—his answer indicated he was not taking me lightly, but the laughter suggested otherwise.
We battled on. Veins bulged from my neck and my face became flushed with blood. Telltale signs I was giving this everything I had.
One of the onlookers shouted out, ‘Don’t give in, Jerome! You should get this guy easily.’
Kaino shouted back, ‘But it’s my left hand.’
I could sniff blood. I could taste his fear. I still had a lot of work to do, but the greatest upset in the history of just about everything suddenly seemed possible.
Fourteen seconds in and I could hear Mike and Jay-Jay discussing what was going on. ‘Oh my god, Jerome is going to get it! Dom is wavering. Jerome is going to kick his arse.’
We swayed almost at the start position for what felt like an eternity—I would have a burst of adrenaline and force Jerome’s right arm to the one o’clock position, then he would manage to push me back to somewhere between the ten and eleven o’clock positions. By now we had been arm-wrestling for thirty seconds—that’s about twenty-nine seconds longer than anybody in the room imagined this tussle would last.
This to-ing and fro-ing continued until 43.6 seconds had passed, when a breakthrough happened and one man managed to wear out his opponent and overpower him.
The winner, much to the surprise of everybody in the room, especially me, was me!
I had arm-wrestled an All Black and won! And not one of those short little half-backs or show-boaty wingers. This was a proper All Black, a hard man.
Jerome Kaino ran his defeated hand over his forehead, then inspected his fingertips. ‘Look at this! I’m sweating again.’
Still, I had my suspicions about the effort Kaino put in. My gut instinct is that at 43.6 seconds he just got bored and deliberately lost so he could carry on meeting and mingling with other patrons. A bit like how a dad will go easy on his young son in backyard sports.
‘He’s pretty strong,’ Jerome exclaimed to my two co-hosts. ‘He nearly popped my shoulder out of the socket, geez!’
Now he was definitely taking the piss. He had to be. Or was he?
When we’d stopped recording, Mike Puru said to Jerome, ‘Hey bro, thanks for letting him win that one. He’s got a bit of an ego, so he’ll love this.’
Jerome interjected, ‘Hey, hey, I tried my best, I really did.’
Whether he did or not, only Jerome Kaino knows and that may be a secret he will take to his grave. Although, he did post this message on Twitter the very next day:
I must admit @DomHarvey is a very strong cat! #fairandsquare damit
Which made me think, ‘Maybe, just MAYBE, I managed to beat an All Black.’ What a thought.
Jerome Kaino and I. He is the one on the left,
with the ‘Kaino’ tattoo on his bicep.
TRACK DOWN MY FIRST KISS
Everyone remembers their first kiss. You know, your first proper kiss. That kiss with someone you are not related to. I reckon there are probably three details most of us never forget—the person’s name, how old you were, and where the kiss took place. Here are some of the answers to these questions from my Facebook friends . . .
Donna, 6, she dragged me behind her dads shed!
Jay
Tony, 14, in his bedroom with ‘return of the Mac’ blaring on the radio.
Amy
Nathan, 10, disabled toilets at soccer camp.
Holli
1
Hayden, 14, St. Pats Silverstream 3rd form dance I dry retched when he stuck his tongue in my mouth.
Vicky
Clint, 11, back of the swimming pools in Hawera . . . sadly I found out later he was gay.
Deidre
Oliver, 7, the skinniest guy in our class who sucked his thumb. It was under the entrance ramp at Mt cook school wellington. He wouldn’t let me go back to class until we kissed! So I pecked him on his lips and next minute the principal walked over us on the ramp! I nearly shit my pants, I thought I was going to be in detention everyday for the rest of my days at that school!
Kendra
Katie, 10, at her place in her wardrobe.
Avon
Chris, 5, boy’s toilets at tikipunga primary. He even said ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’
Elizabeth
Simone, 9, the banks of the Manawatu River.
I remember it vividly. We are talking a proper kiss here, a full-on grown-up ‘pash’ as we called it back then, both our mouths open to allow our respective tongues to engage in an aggressive wrestle, just like we had seen people do on the telly. Do bear in mind this was the early eighties, so my research was limited to a couple of episodes of Falcon Crest and an episode of The Young and the Restless I had watched one day when I was home from school sick. The way both our sets of bucked teeth banged together on impact would possibly suggest that it was her first kiss too.
At that age I had no real interest in or curiosity about the opposite sex. It was actually a grown man I was infatuated with at that time. My life revolved around my obsession with Lance Cairns—despite my blatant lack of any sort of coordination I still harboured dreams of one day putting on the beige vest and a DB Draught headband and playing cricket for New Zealand. It was another couple of years before I managed to put the pieces of the puzzle together and realised that when the coach (who was usually the teacher or a dad of a student) says things like ‘as long as you try your hardest, that’s what matters’, it was a polite adult way of telling a kid he was rubbish.
In hindsight, I should have picked up on the many other warning signs about my lack of cricket ability . . . like how I never managed to make it past the nervous 9 and crack double figures with the bat. True story—my top score was 9, my average was 5. And batting was my strength. Even though this was primary school, where everyone gets a turn to
do everything, the team managed to restrict the number of overs I bowled (using the same technique as Lance Cairns, naturally).
My batting technique involved just swinging my Excalibur (a replica of Lance Cairns’ bat) as hard as I could without any real consideration for where the ball was. Sometimes my eyes would be open but not always. This meant the result was always one of these four outcomes:
1. I’d swing, connect with the ball and knock it over the boundary.
2. I’d swing, hit the ball in the air and someone would catch it.
3. I’d swing, miss and get bowled out.
4. I’d swing, miss it, and so would the wicketkeeper and the ball would roll away for four runs.
Sadly, 1 never happened. Numbers 2 and 3 were regular occurrences. And 4 happened every now and then, depending on the competence of the other team’s wicketkeeper.
My usual after-school routine involved playing cricket, or practising batting or bowling, up my driveway against the garage doors. My little brother, Dan, and I spent thousands of hours out on the driveway playing cricket, and probably a comparable number of hours looking for tennis balls that had been hit into shrubs or over the fence. Seriously, in hindsight it still stuns me to this day how I could be so remarkably bad at cricket given the thousands of hours I practised.
The old lady next door was a vicious old cow. She hated us climbing over her fence to retrieve balls that went over so she would stand in her kitchen watching us and, the minute it happened, she would go outside to get the ball—but rather than throw it back to us she would take it inside with her. Some mornings we would wake up to find chopped-in-half tennis balls back on our side of the fence. What on earth would possess an elderly woman to become a tennis ball murderer?
This one particular day, though, cricket would take a back seat to romance. I was about to bowl my first-ever maiden over. Terrible sports-based pun, my apologies.
It was not chemistry or curiosity that brought our mouths together. It was Jeremy and Crystal. Jeremy Walker was my best mate. He was nine, same as me, but he had a twelve-year-old brother who had passed his vast wisdom down to his young sibling. This made Jeremy something of an enigma—he just knew stuff that no one else our age knew, plus there was this added bonus that if he got in any trouble he would threaten to have his brother beat people up on his behalf. This threat seemed so much more likely than the old chestnut the rest of us fell back on—‘I’ll get my dad to beat up your dad.’
Jeremy also appreciated the company of girls. He even had a girlfriend, Crystal. Simone Lake and Crystal were best friends. And that is how one sunny summer’s afternoon the four of us ended up in a bush on the banks of the Manawatu River for a well-planned kiss.
The date was arranged days in advance. Jeremy took charge and brokered the whole deal. He and Crystal kissed frequently and I suppose he thought it’d be kind of cool: he and his girlfriend and his best mate and his girlfriend’s best friend all hanging out together. In hindsight I do appreciate the faith he had in me but it was never going to work—he was nine with the maturity of a twelve-year-old and I was nine with the maturity level of a seven-year-old at best.
As far as my over-protective Catholic parents were aware, I was going to Jeremy’s after school for a play date, which was factual to a point. And if Mum or Dad phoned to look for me, Jeremy’s mum would just say we were out on a bike ride, which, again, was factual to a point.
Jeremy had the sort of freedom that I could only dream of. It was never enough for me to say I was going out for a bike ride. My mum would interrogate me—asking where I was going, the roads I was taking and how long I would be. I was always guilty until proven innocent. Mum always just assumed I was up to something. On this occasion, she would have been right. But my alibi was so watertight and meticulously planned there was no chance of being caught out.
When the school bell rang at three Jeremy and I met up with Crystal and Simone and Jeremy reaffirmed the meeting place and time.
While he was doing this I just lurked awkwardly in his shadow, avoiding any eye contact or conversation with the girl I was about to kiss. I wasn’t being intentionally rude—I just had no idea what the hell I was doing.
We biked back to Jeremy’s house to prepare. Jeremy went to his brother’s room and came out with a can of Brut deodorant, which we sprayed on so generously it was highly likely we would have burst into flames if the day had been any hotter.
The next step was the mouthwash. Jeremy went first and I followed. He squirted a three-centimetre length of toothpaste on his tongue then swished it around with water. I assume he learned these hygiene techniques from his older brother but since his older brother was only twelve I now wonder who his love mentor was.
Pash preparations complete, we biked to the Manawatu River. Jeremy was on his BMX, which was a cool bike at the time. I was on my Raleigh 20. Dad insisted I got a Raleigh 20 instead of a BMX because he thought it was a more solid, more dependable bike than a BMX. Gee, thanks, Dad. Dependable and reliable may very well be traits that are important to adults but all I wanted to do was fit in and hopefully not look like a dick. The Raleigh 20 was the kid version of a people-mover, a very sensible, practical but unsexy bike.
We soon reached the meeting spot next to the river. Jeremy arrived first, doing some sweet bunny hops and jumps on his bike, which was perfect for this sort of terrain. I arrived quite a few seconds after him on my clunky, tank-like bike complete with mudguards, a bell and a carrier on the back, perfect for a paper round but not so good for walking tracks next to rivers!
The girls were already there, just sitting on a log waiting. I dumped my bike on the ground. My bike had a stand which kept it upright but I thought it would look a lot cooler if I just dropped the bike.
The spot where we met was a bushy reserve with lots of trees and cover. It was a spot Jeremy and Crystal knew well and it seemed highly unlikely any parents, teachers or other random adults would ever catch us here.
Jeremy went over to Crystal and placed his arm around her while I stood uncomfortably next to Simone, a good metre or more still between us.
‘Shall we do this?’ Jeremy said. The rest of us nodded with as much certainty as you would expect from a bunch of nine-year-olds doing something they knew was naughty.
Jeremy explained how it was going to work. ‘I’ll count to three and then we’ll start, okay?’ More nodding from the girls and me.
Jeremy, who was quite a bit shorter than Crystal, then hopped onto the log the girls had been sitting on to bring himself to her eye level. I didn’t find this funny at the time but looking back it cracks me up big time—it must have been like a kiddie version of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman having a snog.
Jeremy started his clinical count: ‘1 . . . 2 . . . 3.’
He and Crystal were underway. They both had their eyes shut and Jeremy had one hand on her hip while his other hand was stroking her hair.
I watched for a quick moment, maybe a second, before I went in for my kiss. I was just like Jeremy but without any of the finesse. Simone’s hands were down by her sides, mine were in my pockets, and the only part of our bodies that touched was our mouths. As I’ve mentioned, our front teeth made a horrible clunking noise on impact. Then we settled into the kiss with our lips perfectly lined up and our tongues darting urgently around each other’s mouths. After what seemed like an eternity but was probably only four or five seconds, I wondered what Jeremy and Crystal were doing and opened my eyes. They were still going, so I continued, even though I was already bored. I wondered if I was doing it wrong, because the whole exercise just felt pointless. We both pulled away from each other and the kiss ended. Stopping it was actually the most natural part of the liaison.
‘I’m finished, Crystal,’ Simone announced.
I followed this up with an unnecessary announcement of my own. ‘Me too, Jeremy. I’m finished.’
Jeremy, still standing on the log, did not respond, and neither did his taller girlfriend. They kept on kissi
ng. Simone and I stood there and kept on watching. And they kept on kissing. And we kept on watching.
This went on for ages—probably somewhere between five and ten minutes. I started to feel overcome with guilt about what I had done, so had this urge to race home to avoid getting found out. I picked up my bike and said my farewells. ‘I’m going now, Jeremy. See you at school tomorrow.’
Jeremy continued to kiss Crystal. No pause to say goodbye, no thumbs up or hand wave behind her back, nothing. Then I rode off on my bike and left Simone standing there without saying goodbye or even acknowledging her. What an arsehole.
Thinking back to that day, I wondered if Simone’s recollection of it was much the same or totally different. Maybe she’d thought it was cool how I rode off without saying goodbye. Chicks do love a bad boy, after all.
I wanted to track down my first kiss for my bucket list because there just seems to be a certain purity and innocence to the whole thing. As you get older you realise just how young nine really is. At the time we probably all felt pretty big—we were seniors at Riverdale Primary, not far off leaving to embark on a new chapter of our lives at Intermediate. But we were just little kids.
I was prepared for a tough search if necessary—old family homes, old phone directories, private detectives, whatever it took. In the end it was a lot easier than that. All I had to do was type her name into the search box on Google, then click through to her Facebook page. Too easy!
Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook: helping creepy dudes track down their former partners since 2004.
Good old Facebook, eh? It seems like just about everybody has a page these days. It allows not-so-close friends and family to see what everyone else is up to without actually having anything to do with each other. The perfect relationship, really! It also allows voyeuristic or just downright nosy people (like me) to peer into the lives of people from our past. Nothing comes close to that guilty excitement you experience when you see that someone you thought was a dick at school is now looking way older than they actually are and balding . . . especially if it is a girl. And of course, Facebook also allows you a glimpse into the lives of past conquests to see how kind or unkind the years have been to them.
