He's a boy from Montmorency who came into the city looking for a good time in a bottle. He found grief, too. When you get as drunk as he did on a Saturday night, even if it is to celebrate a friend's 18th birthday, you're bound to.
Squad car 265 got the call out at 1.47am yesterday. Brawling between two groups of youths on the bitumen at A'beckett Street, near Queen Victoria Market.
By the time Sergeant Mick Gaul and a posse of police officers arrive to break it up, the rival group has fled into the pizza-scented night, the rainiest of this already inconsistent summer.
Nick, 18, sports an oozing cut above his right eye. He's aggro now, resisting repeated entreaties that he get medical help. "I just got bashed, go and find the people who did it to me," he demands of the police.
The police face blood on the pavement and also a puzzle. Is Nick a victim here? Or perhaps a perpetrator?
These are the legal niceties that Sergeant Gaul and more than 200 officers negotiate on hard bitumen, vomit-stained stairwells, in parks and pubs, where the alcohol and testosterone flow on a Saturday night in the city.
On a sodden night in Melbourne, Sergeant Gaul calls on 14 years of experience to unpack tight situations. But there's also undoubted strength in numbers.
Police presence in the city has swelled these past weekends as part of Operation Safe Streets. The fluorescent blur of vests and flashing squad cars encircling the goldfish bowl that is Melbourne at night are perhaps having their desired deterrent effect.
2.44am: Another intoxicated male is causing problems outside the Velour nightclub. The police radio crackles with irony: "I don't know what this gentleman's problem is; he's getting quite stroppy."
By 3am — the tinderbox hour for fights outside pubs and clubs, when revellers swarm for cigarette breaks and taxis — the city's custody centre, where they hold drunks, is full.
Yet for sheer gravity of violence it is a peaceable night compared with two weekends ago when six men landed in hospital with stab wounds and serious facial and head injuries.
"I think just seeing us is in our vest is having an effect," says Sergeant Gaul.
On any night in Melbourne he calls on 14 years of policing experience to defuse a combustible situation. Frequently things may not be quite what they seem.
Case in point, 3.29am. A Priority One crackles on the radio. Two young mothers have ventured into the city from the suburbs. Their big night out has gone awry. Maybe you can blame some of it on the vodka cruisers.
Anna*, who is slurring her words, is confused and distressed. Her friend, much less intoxicated (she's had "four or five"), alleges that while waiting for a cab, a man, also waiting nearby, lured Anna away and attempted to have oral sex with her.
Four squad cars swarm on the site as a sensitive investigation begins. The alleged victim and perpetrator are co-operating.
"I'm sick of guys who think that just because girls are drunk they can do what they want, " complains Sonia from the sidelines.
A tally at the end of the night scores drunks lodged in custody centres to cool off at 77. Nick is arrested but still refuses to go to the hospital, so his mother picks him up from the watchhouse.
Anna insists nothing untoward has happened to her. Her personal tally, after all, is just nine cruisers.
*Anna's name has been changed.
To go on patrol with the police, The Age signed confidentiality agreements.
By Farah Farouque