A few months before my dad died, his eyes had started to go and his skin was turning green. When he finally went to hospital, he was diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer. None of us kids knew why the old man ignored the doctors and refused their help, but none of us were surprised either. After his diagnosis, the old bastard discharged himself, walked the many kilometres home and slumped on the couch. There he stayed, taking no medication and no visitors, instead just rotting away like meat left in the sun.

A few months after his diagnosis, it was time for me to throw the shadow of Charles Sale Hunt over my shoulder, toss him into the car and drive him to the hospital to die. On the old man's last day alive, I pushed my wheelchair-bound mum, who'd been made immobile and silent by multiple strokes, into a giant, bright, sparse, white-tiled hospital room where he was laid out on a bed. Almost all the life had gone from my father; his face was sunken, with yellow eyes like the Hulk's. His hair was white and stringy, and his once strong body had wasted away.

What was left in him was about to be taken by the giant that stood next to his bed, which was dark like a void, hooded, huge, familiar and with a stench that was overpowering. I could feel the immense, crackling, untethered power of that figure, but I dared not look directly at it.

I could feel that even looking at that thing could level buildings, maybe even cities.

I kept my eyes on my father. As I stared at the old man, I knew he was going with the devil that day. I also knew there was nothing to be done about it. My father had lived his life, made his choices and committed his sins. Now he was going with the darkness.

So be it.

I find it hard to remember my parents' faces these days. I always remember my dad's blue overalls and the blue overcoat he wore in winter, and I remember my mum's big old Afro. Sometimes, though, in my memories, smudges have replaced their faces.

***

Most of the neighbours didn't like our parents, and they particularly gave Dad a very wide berth. We kids didn't have that luxury. I used to spend a lot of time trying to figure out why the beatings happened: why they happened in general, or what the cause of any specific beating might have been. It's only now that I know they didn't really have much to do with us, they were about something else. That something else I hope never to know about.

Dad would beat us for any little thing, and with any implement. Fists, feet, broom handles, sticks, electrical cords, the hose that went from the washing machine to the tap. That last one really sucked, because it was heavy and it hurt like hell when Dad really got it going, but no matter how hard you got beat with it, it never broke.

With that hose, Dad could just whup until he got tired, and he had energy for that work, man. He loved that hose.

He was big on psychological pain, too, my old man. A beating he seemed to particularly enjoy was forcing us onto our knees on the floor in the sitting room, facing out the window at the pear tree, where he'd go and spend time carefully selecting a whupping branch. We'd hope for a new, young branch, or an old one ready to break, but he'd usually end up with something hefty and durable.

Another of his favourites was calling one of us over, and when we got there, throwing all his weight into a thigh punch. You'd fall to the ground with a dead leg and then he had you. You couldn't run, you just had to lie there and wait for him to do whatever he wanted to do to you. Was he going to get the hose? Was he going to get the broom? Were you going to get the boot? Are those his footsteps?

He also used to like making us beat each other, and if ever we cried, he'd jump in with his man fists and feet. All the beatings were worse if we cried. If we cried, the extra strikes were on us. At the end, the blame was usually equally shared. We shouldn't have been so weak.

When I saw the movie Wolf Creek, the cruel bastard of a main character Mick Taylor reminded me of my dad. He would have made a good torturer, the old fella. He really put his heart and soul into his sadism.

***

When Hunt was at his career peak, earning up to $500,000 a fight, drugs and gambling threatened to derail everything...

I was a man on a tear. I was in a city that, as a young man, had offered only small channels to live my life in – but now the whole horizon was open to me. I was, once again, susceptible to suggestion.

One of those suggestions was from Tommy, asking if I'd like to buy some P. Not a small, usable amount – a large, sellable amount. Tommy suggested that if I could get twenty grand together, he could help me turn it into sixty grand in a few weeks.

Obviously I didn't need money, but I wasn't saying no to very much at the time, so I said, 'Fuck it, let's do it. Let's sell some crystal meth.'

Thankfully I never ended up selling any of the P. Any decent drug dealer knows you don't get high on your own supply, but I wasn't going to be any decent drug dealer.

I had plenty to do at night but little to do during the day, so one morning I started smoking the P, then walked over to the Sky City Casino and sat down at the highest stakes pokie machine I could find. For the next three days my ass rarely left that seat. I took a break only to piss and get stuck back into my giant bag of meth.

I spent twenty grand on the first day, regularly sending my mates off to get more sheaves of cash so I could cram the notes into the mouth of that beast. I blew twenty grand on the second day, too, and by then I was a dribbling automaton, existing just to press that button, over and over and over, and in one drug-buzzed haze I'd pissed away a yearly salary for most of my mates, ending up in the pockets of who-the-hell-knows. On that second day I became obsessed by the jackpot – a slowly increasing number illuminated above the row of machines where I was sitting.

On the third day, a few times my fortunes danced up to the line of success, before retreating and taking with them thousands more dollars. In the afternoon, with at least another twenty grand invested, I won – possibly the worst thing that could have happened to me. The lights lit, the noise sounded and the credits started to tick over – into the hundreds, into the thousands, into the tens of thousands. It wasn't the jackpot but it was pretty close: I'd won $54,000.

Seeing those credits on the machine felt strange. I didn't feel like I'd won – after all I hadn't – nor did I feel like I'd lost. As far as I was concerned I didn't need any cash, I just felt like I had at the end of any other drug-fucked day.

I guess one good take-away from this bender was at the end of the week we'd managed to smoke all of the crystal meth and I wasn't going to be a drug dealer. When we got to the end of the last bag, I actually felt relieved. Maybe subconsciously that's why we smoked it all.

An edited extract reproduced from Born to Fight by Mark Hunt and Ben McKelvey, with permission from Hachette NZ, $34.99 RRP, available 29 September 2015, where all good books are sold.