Righto kids, it’s story time. I’ve decided to share with you some stories of my youth so you may learn from my example. Good example or bad example doesn’t really come into it, but we can probably assume bad.
While I was young, care free and stupid (read: at university) my collection of friends and associates liked nothing better than to savour a cleansing ale and debate the finer points of social interaction, politics and religion. Either that or our nights ended up looking like Iraq if the US forces had been dropping beer, women and road-works signs from their aircraft instead of bombs.
Amongst some of our social circle our BBQ’s were known as marathon events to be feared by the uninitiated. Working in bars did nothing to lessen the regularity of late nights, late mornings and day-3 kick-ons (when you wake up/regain consciousness/get discharged from the ER on the third day of a bender and decide you might as well keep going). In fact there was a while there where our default state was ‘drunk’ and we had to make a conscious effort to sober up on days where we were working.
During this golden age of golden ale I found myself being on the receiving end of a cry for help. A friend of a friend had been asked if she could invite some young gentlemen along to an evening of birthday related revelry. Apparently the birthday girl had found her social circle had less cocks than a militant-lesbian chicken farm. I’m guessing there must a been a series of comical miscommunications that lead to the words “young gentlemen” being confused with “drunken idiots” because there I was telling my friends about the party we were attending that weekend and at no point did anyone ask if they needed to rent a tuxedo. I think even a tuxedo t-shirt would have been high-brow for us.
So the night has arrived and we’ve started the night with a nice big feed, a couple of cartons of beer and that all-time favourite male bonding ritual ‘watching the game’. Someone’s team won, everyone got drunk. I’ll skip the details of the drive out to the party but rest assured it consisted mostly of two cars loads of young men doing what young men do; drinking, some minor racing and shouting and the odd arse hanging out the window. We’ve descended upon the nice little community holding this birthday soirée with all the subtly of the Concorde’s last flight and to be honest, there wasn’t much chance of anything going well when two car loads of seasoned alcoholics turn up with a couple of cartons of beer and half a hundred pre-mixed peel-and-drink shots (In the worst flavours possible, banana & sambuca? Really?). Mind you the shots didn’t do much except ruin the poor girls carpet...
We’ve arrived, been introduced to the birthday girl, been introduced to her enormous chesticles, discovered the party was being held while her parents were out of town and then immediately commenced to cause trouble. We didn’t set out to start an argument, it just kind of happened. It turns out when you wear a t-shirt with a silhouette of a pole-dancer and the words “I Support Single Mums” across it, you might offend some people’s delicate feelings. If you should somehow find yourself in this situation the correct response is probably not anything like as follows:
Girl (having seen my shirt): “My mum wasn’t a stripper! She raised me and my 5 brothers and sisters by working hard and she still had time for us without ever having to be a stripper!”
Me (not even bothering to try and explain the concept of a ‘joke t-shirt’): “5 brothers and sisters and you as well? No wonder she wasn’t a stripper, she wouldn’t have been able to bank roll that. Obviously your mother was a whore if she made that sort of income”
Girl: “whinge whinge whinge, something about rights and equality, whinge”
Yeah, I tuned out pretty quickly when I got distracted by beer.
The good news is that one of my friends managed to hook up with this girl shortly after this exchange based entirely on telling this girl what a horrible human being I am. He may have embellished slightly in suggesting that I kick puppies for fun and once chased an elderly hip-replacement patient in a ride-on lawnmower. I’ve never kicked puppies. He even managed to salvage himself out of high-fiving me as I walked past while he explained to the girl about my apparent fondness for the führer and his great plans.
I later named this move the Luftwaffer Wingman, in honour of this stroke of genius (spending a whole night sharing a girl’s hatred of a friend just to get her into bed).
As the night wore on I steadily worked my way through the character flaws of each guest at the party, my particular favourite was the kid explaining how the Army had pre-selected him for direct recruitment into the Special Forces instead of the traditional method of actually using some kind of selection process and training course. Having pointed out that a skinny teenager with a homo-esque ear piercing, problems with authority inherited from MTV and a firm belief that “smoke weed erryday” is a life philosophy might not be the first choice of recruiters for the armed services, let alone for the cream of the crop, the young squire defended his honour with robust verbal jousting. This ended the way it usually does when someone realises they came to battle of wits with a rubber chicken. Also that I’m a foot taller than them.
Having successfully convinced the idiot that his village needed him, I found myself following a time honoured tradition of peeing in the garden. As a general rule at parties, gentlemen will yield the indoor bathroom to the ladies as a sign of chivalry and deference to the fact their aim might not be so steady after a couple of shandies. Instead men follow the old rule of “I’ve had three beers, the world is my urinal”. During my time contemplating the violets and lavender bushes of the garden I spied a cheeky little gnome staring back at me from beneath some bushes. So with the firm knowledge that this would turn into a “it seemed like a good idea at the time” thing, I gave the smug little bugger a nudge with my foot and was delighted to discover I’d decapitated the cheerful midget of the marigolds.
Souvenirs of the night:
Birthday Girl’s phone number
Decapitated Garden Gnome’s head
The joy of seeing Skinny Special Forces Teenager called out on his blatant lies to the point where he went home
The now famous “Luftwaffer Wingman” manoeuvre
Further evidence that I really shouldn’t be trusted unsupervised
-Worst Guy Ever
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