Within a day or two of being electrocuted, I went back to see my doctor and told him what had happened. After everything I had been through with the myoclonus, he was understandably in disbelief that another electric shock had been followed by the symptoms suddenly disappearing. He sent me for further testing to make sure there wasn't anything else going on, but from my point of view, the most important thing was that the violent jerking was gone.

With the myoclonus no longer affecting my daily life, I could finally start thinking about working again. I was genuinely excited about the possibility of getting back into employment and getting myself out of the situation I had ended up in. Living in the bus had given me somewhere to survive when I needed it, but I didn't want that to be my future.

I started applying for jobs everywhere, and before long I came across a position for an assistant manager at a very busy holiday park near Petone.

It was a large operation with powered and non-powered camping sites, cabins and motel accommodation. During the summer months, there could be around five hundred people staying there each night, so there was always plenty happening.

The job involved checking guests in, taking bookings, dealing with customer issues and complaints, general caretaking, building maintenance, laundry, booking Interislander ferry tickets and handling nighttime security. I would also be on call after hours when problems came up.

The role suited me. I was practical, could fix things and didn't mind dealing with people, but what really caught my attention was that it was a live-in position. The job came with a four-bedroom house on site and a huge garage. Right beside the house was also a large storage yard where I would be able to keep my bus.

It was exactly what I needed. One job could give me an income, a proper home and somewhere to store the bus.

I applied, went along for the interview and, to my surprise, got the job.

I wasted no time moving out of Silverstream. The old Bedford was taken from beside the former hospital and parked in the storage yard at the holiday park, while I moved into the house that came with the position.

Like a cat with nine lives, I had managed to land on my feet again.

Zara came with me, and I settled into the job quickly. I enjoyed the variety of the work because no two days were exactly the same. There were guests arriving and leaving, things around the property that needed repairing, bookings to organise and the occasional problem that needed sorting out after hours.

The roster also left me with enough spare time to make some extra money on the side.

With my mechanical background, buying and selling cars seemed like an obvious choice. I would find cheap vehicles that needed some work, buy them, repair whatever was wrong and then sell them for a profit. Sometimes I would buy a different car each week, work on it in the garage and have it sold by the following week.

Flipping cars came naturally to me. I understood vehicles, could do most of the repairs myself and now had a huge garage where I could work on them.

I also had a mate move into the house, so there was usually someone around. Life had become comfortable surprisingly quickly.

It was through one of my car deals that I met a bloke around my age who, for the purposes of this story, I will call Tim.

Tim seemed like a pretty good bloke when I first met him. We had similar interests and got along easily. He loved motorcycles and fast cars, enjoyed clubbing and liked having a good time. Before long we were hanging out regularly, riding motorcycles together, having barbecues at my place and going out on weekends.

There was another side to Tim's lifestyle as well.

He was into dr@gs, particularly ecstasy and something I had very little experience with at the time: m@thamphetamine, commonly known in New Zealand as P, short for pure.

I was hardly innocent when it came to dr@gs. I had already experimented with different substances and had spent plenty of time partying, so being around dr@gs wasn't particularly shocking to me. P was something new.

The weekends with Tim became big ones. We would start partying on Friday and sometimes wouldn't stop until Sunday evening. With P in the picture, staying awake for the entire weekend suddenly seemed easy.

At that stage, it felt like another part of the party. We had motorcycles, cars, barbecues, nightclubs and plenty of people around us. P gave me the energy to keep going when normally my body would have told me it was time to stop.

I had no idea what I had stumbled into.

Tim would eventually prove to be an unstable and dangerous person, and our friendship would become one of the most toxic relationships of my life. But I couldn't see that when I first met him. He was a new mate who enjoyed many of the same things I did.

More importantly, I couldn't see what P was going to become.

At the time, it was something we took on weekends to keep the party going.

I didn't know that those weekends were the beginning of a twenty-five-year addiction.