22.5 Hour Party People

On second thought, fuck Bloke Fawkes Day. Fuck it in the knottiest, the most involved, the most un-get-out-of-able position diagrammed in Joseph Weckerle's Golden Book of Love, namely this one:

I realise that this here little exordium might strike the reader as being a smidge schizophrenic or bi-polar--or whatever bit of clinical-psychological babble passes mustard among the vulgar as a synonym for contradictory or incongruous or just plain slightly off these days--when juxtaposed with the peroration of my last post; so with that in mind, I'll just whip out my two-quid-at-Woolworths rhetorical trowel here and explain that fuck is to be taken here (i.e., through the twin-arseholes of the reader's irises) in a relative rather than in an absolute sense, that it should not be understood as expressing my wholesale, unrepealable abjuration of the Bloke Fawkes Day holiday, but rather as registering a provisional and partial ebbing of my enthusiasm for that holiday in favour of another event to which it must, for the moment, yield pride of place in my affections. And just in case the cement I'm working with here is too abstract for you, I'll concretise my point with a little illustration: there's a scene in this porn flick I once saw at the age of 12 during a Boy Scouts camping trip in the Pennines, in which the hero, a bloke name of Moon, is experiencing the pleasures of buggery for the first time--as a bowler, with a girl--and cries out 'Fuck that pussy! I ain't never done this before. I'm sticking with this,' (adding more calmly, as an aside, with impeccable timing, a few seconds later, 'I like watching it go in, too'.). Now, in thus willing the pussy in question to be fucked--i.e., not fucked by him--and announcing his intention of 'sticking with' the arse, our hero clearly did not wish it to be understood, least of all by his young fuckmate herself, that he was thereby permanently renouncing the usufruct of the front entrance in favour of the back; he wished it merely to be understood, rather, that by virtue of its sheer novelty and strangeness this new backwards coital dispensation demanded a degree of attention and alacrity that rendered the exigencies of attending to the old frontwards dispensation of negligible interest and importance to him for the moment--and only for the moment. And it is in precisely the same spirit and with precisely the same intent--mutatis mutandi--that I now say 'Fuck Bloke Fawkes Day'. For just as we may conjecture that, with the subsidence of his enthusiasm for the arse relative to the pussy (and in tandem with his acquisition of mastery of the former orifice), Mr Moon eventually became accustomed to shifting freely back and forth between front and back entrances during a single evening of ballage, so we may conjecture that come next Bloke Fawkes Day I shall be fully prepared to go balls deep, so to speak, in celebration of the rites of that holiday without stinting an inch in my obeisance to the by-then-no-longer-new dispensation of which I write. In fact, if Mr Sedule manages to get his merde together and hire some new help, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to do fairly by both of these institutions at the Ape itself (unless there's an Arsenal match on that night, in which case things might get a bit dodgy). But here I go again bollocksing up my narration, prematurely disclosing key elements of the plot before I've even properly completed the setup. And it really is high time that I made it plain what I mean by this new state of affairs, dispensation, or institution--not, I'm sure, that I really need to as far as my readers north of the Channel and east of the Atlantic are concerned. For the benefit of the rest of youse, then and though, let me just say that what I'm talking about here is the introduction of 24-hour drinking to the UK. Yes, after decades of plugging their ears and whistling 'Lillabullero' to the arguments adduced by such paragons of common sense, such consciences of the Kingdom, as Charlotte Church and George Orwell, our Parliament have finally seen fit to drag us all shitting and giggling forwards into the 20th century (or back into the early 19th, take your pick). Now I know it's quite fashionable in certain geezerly circles to yawn disdainfully over this here legal-cum-mixological Reformation and act as though it merits no more notice than, say, the re-branding of the Royal Mail as Consignia (and as though it's just as unlikely to take). 'You younkers,' says one of these geezers, 'weren't around for the switchover from LSD to the decimal system. Now that was a cataclysmic event. Might as well apply for US statehood as soon as give up the torture of calculating how many pence go into a guinea, was what we all said back then. But this 24-hour-drinking thing--pthhbthbthhh! As though in practical terms it's going to make fuck any difference. As though 24-hour drinking has ever been by fannie adams's stretch of the imagination illegal in the UK. As though it hasn't always been the case here that, provided you know where to go, courtesy of our own inimitable take on the speakeasy known as a lock-in, you can drink till the cows come home on any night of the week.' Ah, but there's the old chamois--provided you know where to go, to which appositive our geezer really should have added another one reading and provided you have the werewithal to get there. Evidently he moved to London at a time when rents and crime were low enough that the average bloke would both want and be able to afford to live in the parts of town that fairly bristle with pubs with weeklong lock-in policies; either that or he's some sodding pensioner who has all the time in the world to squander on half-hour-long walks and bus-trips to such pubs. As for me, living as I do in the semi-suburban fringes of north London, I've only got one local, and I'd like to think I'm not so pathetic as to piss away the better part of a Tuesday or Wednesday evening hoofing or busing it to a semi-local a half a mile into the next postcode for the dubious privilege of staying on till midnight or 1am in the company of the assemblage of toothless fruit-machinists I'd doubtlessly happen upon there. Which counter-factual traipse brings me by an oblique route to the site of my quarrel with the institution of the lock-in eo ipso. My satisfaction-seeking thwack on the old face-cheeks of that institution amounts to this: that it is all too aptly named. At a lock-in you are essentially a cell-mate of whatever motley band of boozers the bitch goddess Contingency has seen fit to leave straggling on the premises at 11, and you're presented with the stark choice between sticking it out with them and going home to pound your pud and/or Stella in solitude. In theory, I suppose, this constraint might turn out to be paradoxically liberating; as (in theory) for all you know, these self-same stragglers could turn out to be a whole university women's lacrosse team. But in practice (at least at the Ape on those occasional weekend lock-in nights when I've been, as they say, flying solo), you invariably finish up consorting with the sort of anthropomorphic space-hoovers that make you wish you hadn't ventured out of the maisonette in the first place: ever-so-genteel and ever-so-boring (and ever-so-male) Barnet supporters ('I say, old chap, that was a bally good arse-reaming we got tonight, dontcherthink?' 'Bally good indeed, MDF. Hard cheese!'), blue-haired sexagenarian postmen's widows on the make for some vigintegenerean schlong, and the like. How roseate, in contast, would my Friday and Saturday evenings at the Ape be, were they only brightened by the remotest hope that come 11, just as I would be reaching the apogee of the cool buzz and would be in my rarest conversational form, at any minute some fresh face and perky pair of Bristols might sashay in through the front door and plant themselves on some barstool in my immediate vicinity. But in clutching at the modal auxiliaries would and might with the tenacity of a Scotsman grasping for a golf ball, I am once again getting ahead of myself, which wouldn't matter so much if this here post were intended merely as an op-ed paean to the new licensing laws rather than as the yarn or mini-romance that I conceived it to be ab ovo. So, anyway, as Jeff Shoemaker might put it, here beginneth the Tale of the Wandering Barnetian Bibulophile:

Last Friday evening, I get home from work round about six. No takeaway tonight, as I'm planning eventually to sup on the Ape's house fish and jalappeno poppers (which surf-y-tierra combo, incidentally, appears to be catching on like wild fire in Barnet, whence I'm sure it'll spread with equal rapidity to the neighbouring boroughs. In ten years' time, I shan't be surprised if fish and chips are as foreign as escargot to the untutored English palate.). As always, the first thing I do is check my messages on my land phone. There's two of them. The first one listens as follows:

Eh? [female voice] It's me again. Like I gots to remind you. Here it is, a stane's throw from the end of the month, and I'm still waiting on me fucking child support cheque. Oh, TBS, I don't give fuck all about meself. It's little Billy wot concerns me. [I hear a baby crying in the background.] To think that you could give a putrid tinker's fuck about the well-being of your own flesh and blood makes me blousy as all fucking get out! All the same [she continues in softer, more conciliatory tones], if you wanted to lay out the money on an all-expenses-paid [sic] package tour of Mallorca instead, I shouldn't raise a finger by way of demurral...

Bloody telemarketers! The second message is from Ronnie, who starts off by singing, in the timbre and phrasing of a spot-on Jimmy Durante impressionist: Happy times are here for once; ain't felt like this in fucking months; Gonna bare my ass to all you cunts; happy times--a-a-a-re he-e-e-re fo-o-o-r o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-nce! [I can't imagine what untoward access of good fortune has served thus to rouse Ronnie from his phlegmish slumbers. News of his coming into an inheritance, courtesy, say, of the death of Uncle Milton?] Then he continues, in speech: 'Pip-pip and tally-ho, YFC. Well, I trust you know what tonight's all about. It's about partying like it's still 1999, innit?; and in Las-fucking-Vegas, not in Salt-Lake-fucking-City. So stuff your pockets with plenty of caffeine tablets and profin and meet me at the Ape at eight. Be there or be...Cher? No, I've got it: ware--Be there or be ware! [Thaht's right, you fookin coont! I hear a Northern voice boistrously seconding Ronnie just slightly off-phone.] Oh, yeah, and Rugger. I've got my mate Herb-Air with me here--he's down from Leeds visiting for a couple of days. As you can probably tell, we've been getting a head start on the proceedings. I took the day off, you see, to entertain my company. Anyway, Rugger, hope you don't mind if he comes along. Cheers.' [And what if he doos mind? It's a free coontry, innit? I hear this Leedsian git querying Ronnie just before the phone cuts out.]

Well, although I never did admit as much to Ronnie, the truth was that as in the case of Halloween and Guy Fawkes Day, I had forgotten for at least a good month or so that the new licensing laws were going to take effect this past weekend--or, to be more precise, on last Thursday. But, TBS, Ronnie had been right to act as though what tonight was all about went without saying . That bit about partying like it was still 1999, etc.--those were my very words, uttered in his presence at some point last spring, and amounting to a kind of vow or promise to party in just such a fashion on the first 24-hour drinking weekend night, viz tonight. As to the prospect of his bringing this other bloke along, well, stricto sensoo, I didn't mind it, as of course I had no monopoly on Ronnie's time and it wasn't as though I'd specified last spring that our antemillennial-style baccanale was to take the form of a cul-a-cul or date. I had no just cause for getting shirty over the matter, in other words. But in a looser yet if anything more powerful sense, I very much did mind the intrusion of this bloke into our weekly routine; in the first place because I needed another bloke acquaintance about as much as I needed an extra hole in my schlong [Naturally, I'm speaking here as the type of bloke who doesn't go in for genital piercings], in the second place because I knew full well that his presence would effectually put the kibosh on any speculative or philosophical turn the convo might have otherwise taken. I've already said my piss on the demerits of the two-blokes-cum-one girl conversational trio, and rest assured I have a whole nother bladderful of piss in reserve for its all-bloke counterpart. In two words, when three blokes get together for a chinwag, you end up with a recipe for rampant, interminable, unadulterated, LCD-ish anorakism. By anorakism I have something in mind that is in some ways more specific and in other ways less specific than most people's notions of it. For most of these most people, anorakism is a strictly subcultural phenomenon, involving sci-fi TV show fandom, stamp collecting, and other pastimes associated with the sorts of coke-bottle-specs-sporting blokes who don't pull the birds or get out much. For others of these most (most of them being blokesses, incidentally), the manifestation of any bit of knowledge they happen to be unacquainted with, by whatever means or motive, counts as proof of unregenerate anorakism on the part of the manifester (-or?). For example: one night about a year ago I was sharing a table at the Ape with Manish Shah and his girl Manisha Asha, and, talking of a Charlton-Arsenal match of a couple of nights previous in which, standing there literally with his thumb up his arse (the camera had zoomed in for proof), an uncharacteristically absent-minded Stephan Andersen had given up a goal to the Gunners, I said to Manish, 'If that cunt had had any decency he would have committed Sapporo after a fuck-up like that, right then and there.' (this 'committing Sapporo' idiom being an instance of McGyver Signature Rhetorical Ploy #24: The Deliberate Malapropism [Sapporo (the beer) = a substitution for sapuku, another word for hara kiri]). To which squib Manish appended a cleverer squib of his own: 'But being a Dane, wouldn't he have had to commit Carlsberg instead?' At which point Manisha pounced in screaming 'ANORAK ALERT! ANORAK ALERT! and started thrashing Manish about the neck and shoulders with her brand-wanking-new Fistoulari handbag. I knew it was a Fistoulari because earlier in the convo she'd been bragging about how she'd picked it up a week earlier at Harrod's for a mere £150.53 ('a steal'); and when I'd conjectured that this Fistoulari bloke or blokess must be an eminent personage in the world of fashion indeed if his/her handbags routinely fetched upwards of 150 quid in the bargain rack, she'd come back at me with 'HELLO? He's only the most important designer to have come out of the former Soviet Union since last summer! Trust a bloke not to know.' But Manisha's protestations vis-a-vis Sapporo and Carlsberg notwithstanding, it was she and not her bloke or myself who proved to be a true anorak that night, inasmuch as: 1) (and preeminently) Manish had introduced the Carlsberg moniker into the convo in a purely jocular spirit--meaning that he hadn't intended it as a genuine impugnment of my knowledge of beer-brand names or of their pertinence to suicide rituals, and b) although Sapporo and Carlsberg might not exactly be household names among teetotallers, they have enjoyed a fair amount of publicity in the beer-swilling community for a great many years if not decades (certainly for a period extending back well beyond the summer of '04), and 3) I'm sure that if Manisha had queried either one of us on the significance of the names Carlsberg and Sapporo, the query-ee would have thought it proper to rejoin with a more civil riposte than a lecture and a thrashing--I know full well that I would have calmly, and with exemplary unshirtiness, explained to her that these were the brand names of foreign beers. You see, for me, it is in just the sort of petty oneupblokeship on trivial, ephemeral, inconsequential matters as was evinced by Manisha on that night that true anorakism consists. But to its credit, anorakish chit-chat does possess the singular merit of absolving its expounders of the obligation to think; which is why (to close up this digression and bring it full circle) it comes in particularly handy in a convo involving three blokes whose only common bond is their acquaintance with one of the trio, that one being in this case Ronnie. I can only assume that when three blokesses find themselves thrown together in the same configuration, they anorak it up about the names of fashion designers or blokes' schlong sizes; with us, it's either women's measurements or sport statistics. Last Friday's anorakfest centred on a particularly unwholesome metastatization of the second variety of anorakism, to wit, an anoraks' kvetchvest on the salaries of leading footballers. And throughout this veritable auction of copraphasia I of course felt like a classic fourth wheel--the third wheel in such sitches, being, of course, the imaginary mate you apostrophise in your head by way of keeping your hands off your shirt front and your biscuits inside your belly. By default I tend to picture this imaginary mate as being Ronnie himself, but as Ronnie's actually sitting there in the flesh, I bring in my old UEA buddy Ricky 'Tex' Winckelmann to sub for him. Lucky for me, in my fish 'n' poppers I had a plausible enough cause for pretty much absenting myself from the actual proceedings (the lads for their part contenting themselves with beer nuts), and devoting myself wholesale to my hypothetical chinwag with Tex, at least for the first 20 minutes or so.

'And that coont Rio Ferdinand from Man United,' I notice Herb saying at about minute 27, 'with his hundred-fooking-thousand-quid-a week salary--he takes the fooking cake. A hoondred-fooking thousand quid a week to kick a bag of air around a field.' [As against the two hundred quid a week you probably get for rolling a pair of bollocks against your tonsils, I think to meself over my last popper and bit of fish.] 'And you know where all that mooney's gonna go, dontcha?'

'Oh, I know,' says Ronnie. 'Straight up his...'

But Herb cuts Ronnie short with a peremptory lollipop man-esque flash of his upraised palm; brings his pint glass mercilessly crashing down on to a helpless cashew; leans over; and, with a finger holding shut one nostril, actually hoovers up the powdery residue of the nut with the other one. The things some especially stupid cunts will do to get the last word in, I says to myself as I spectate on this jack-assian performance. 'And in this case,' I continue, addressing Tex, 'the last word itself is cuntishly stupid enough in its own right. Why should I care if Rio Ferdy sinks all five-million-plus-quid of his annual pay cheque into a line of coke long enough to circle the equator ten times? I know what I'd do if I was pulling in that amount of money: I'd buy me an olympic-sized swimming pool and keep it filled to the high-water mark with Stella continuously circulating at a temperature of 2 degrees centigrade. And that's hardly a Geldolfian undertaking.' 'Hardly,' Tex concurs with empathic (and emphatic) stroppiness.

Anyway, so then, as Herb's wiping cashew bogeys from his nose, Ronnie excuses himself for a trip to the gents; and now comes the moment I've been dreading; a moment that I full well know will make the first part of the evening, as shitty as it was, seem by comparison like a dip in the Stella pool I've just sketched in my dreams--the moment when I'm left alone at table with Mr Air and, for Ronnie's sake, have to hew out a conversation from the living rock of total un-shit-givingness about him that saturates every pore of my being, or, at any rate, whatever part of you is supposed to give a fuck about other people. 'Well,' I says to Tex, after asking him if he'd mind leaving Herb and me alone for a second, 'let's just hope Ronnie only has to let go a number one in there.' 'Yeah, let's just hope,' Tex says, rolling his eyes and stepping cooperatively off to the bar.

And then I address to Herb the only question I've so far got in reserve for this moment, namely: 'I gather you met Ronnie in Manchester, at the University?'

'Yeah, that's right--well, not actually at the University itelf; at a Blur gig at the Free Trade Hall, as a mahtter of fahct, back in '96. But, yeah, we were both at the University at the time. You want to make soomething of it? Got soomething against the old former VU of M, have you?'

'Course not, you f...my dear feller. After all, round these parts my alma mater, the University of East Anglia, is known as the University of Manchester of the southeast.'

'Oh, is that so?'

'Yes it is.' By now we've reached the kind of coversational impasse that, for the sake of extricating yourself from it, you start looking after your own entertainment and giving the old two-finger salute to your interlocutor's; that point in the convo where you start asking your new acquaintance the sorts of questions that, while seldom amounting to outright provocations of shirtiness, are still for safety's sake best broached at the morning-after debriefing with the third party rather than to the face of the second one. I think you'll catch my meaning as soon as you see the question I next posed to Herb-Air--one that'd been needling me from the moment I heard Ronnie's phone message--set down in CRT pixels:

'That's an interesting Judeo-Christian-Islamic name you've got there: Herb-Air. Would it be presumptuous of me to ask how it's spelt?'

['No more presumptuous than to ask me to drop my trousers right here and now and deliver a stool sample into my pint glass' is what the look that accompanies his answer seems to say, but in its bare transcription the answer itself spells 'unadulterated accommodation' in seven letters:] 'H-E-R-B-E-R-T.'

Just as I'd suspected. This here Herbert bloke had indeed turned out to be a specimen of one of the most unsightly species in my private menagerie of arse-chafers, the cunt with the name that's spelt like a standard English name but pronounced with a foreign accent. (I've never quite settled on which type of cunt is worse, the mum or dad who gives their nipper such a name or the nipper himself who clings to the phoney pronuciation into his adult years. Bestowing a name like that on your kid essentially amounts to issuing yourself, and him, a lifetime permit to make sensible, no-harm-meaning people--meaning anyone unlucky enough to see your name in print before they hear it--feel like turds.) Now here's the point where, if I give two shits about my shirt, I'd best keep my gob zippered. But I guess I don't give those two selfsame shits, because I say, 'In other words, Herbert.'

'No, in oother fooking words, Herb-AIR.'

'Ah, I get it. Your parents are naturalised French immigrants. Or perhaps--mind you, you speak with a more convincing West Yorkshire accent than Davie Gedge himself--perhaps you yourself were born in France?'

'No, I was born in fooking Leeds. And me moom is from Brahdford, and me dahd is from Newcaastle.'

'Fair enough,' I say, and make as if suddenly to take an uncommonly keen interest in the wood-knots in the floorboards; but inwardly all the while I'm serenading my shirt to the tune of 'So Long, It's Been Good to Know You'.

'Look, mate, are you taking the piss out of me?'

'Prendre ta pisse? Moi? Unthinkable. Impossible, in fact: I took especial care to leave me piss hoover at home tonight. Mind you, I'm beginning rather to wish I hadn't...'

[TO BE CUNTINUED]