Ape Night Afterdusk

Well, as promised in my letter to LaMont Mörike-Jones, the North London Arsenal-Bashers did indeed meet up at the Ape night before last. Unsurprisingly, Mr M-J himself failed to make an appearance; hence I am vouchsafed the present liberty, this Saturday afternoon, of catching up on my blog-posting (i.e. as against the counterfactual ordeal of trying on my rent-a-lederhosen tux at the tailor's). [Interesting sidenote about Herr Mörike-Jones: the day after I posted his letter and my reply to it, as I was doing a bit of inline research on the Swabo-Liberians, I came across the Mörike family's genealogy website, where I made the following rather jaw-dropping-injuicing discovery; namely, that in 1911 one Hans Mörike the Fifth, a member of the 1909 Swabo-Liberian landing party, took a wife name of Melba McGyver, elder sister of one...(drumroll)...you guessed it, Terrance McGyver, future circus contortionist and great-grandfather of YFCT. Do you hear that, LaMont? Your great grandmother is my great great auntie, meaning we're family--cousins! (A parenthetical caveat to you, LaMont, just in case you're ever so so slightly tempted to exploit our newfound consanguinity for ends of your own: whilst I am able and all too happy to recommend you to Proctologitex HR for a position in our factory stockroom, it is well beyond my present power to lend you so much as a single shilling; you will, after all, recall that I am worth the pauperly sum of negative 3000 quid [or rather, as of last week, negative 3500]).]

Anyway, that side note aside, I suppose a bit of backfilling on the NL Arsenal-Bashers themselves is in order here. I'd long been an admirer of and frequent visitor to their website, when, at some point not much posterior to the advent of the present calendar year, I finally screwed up the co-jones to email their President, one Reginald Dunn, beseeching him to take me under the wing of their Great Cause in whatever humble capacity I might be of some use; and received the following terse reply within an hour: ‘So you think you’ve got what it takes to become a board-certified Arsenal-Basher? Be at the Pissing Ninja in Hendon next Thursday at 8 p.m., sporting the home colours of one of the following clubs: Liverpool, Blackburn, ManU, Tottenham, West Brom, Middleborough or Wigan.’ So, I went out and bought myself a Wigan shirt with Jason Roberts's name and number and turned up at the appointed pub within excusable distance of the appointed time. I must confess that during my tube trip down there I was a bit apprehensive about my forthcoming initiation as an official Arsenal-basher. Not that there could be any question of my lacking the basic qualifications (i.e., of my hating Arsenal by so much as a cunt-hair's breadth less than the required amplitude); and as for that old blood-and-soil ‘It-takes-a-native-Londoner-to-make-a-true-Arsenal-basher, Johnny Norfolk' line of badgering, pecuniary considerations alone would have restrained me from seeing my brand-new 30-quid JR shirt ripped to shreds in defence of the cause of inter-regional Arsenalophobia. What accounted for my misgivings was lack of intestinal rather than testicular fortitude; for you see, I envisaged the initiation rites by default as a succession of wag-the-dog-form trials-by-gullet reminiscent of the so-called hazing processes of American college fraternities. I imagined myself being forced, for example, to devour both hind quarters (i.e., Arse-'n'-all) of a sucking pig in under a minute; or to swallow, in an equally brief interval, a goldfish-bowl's-worth of miniature lead cannonballs. Fortunately, the North London Arsenal Bashers proved far too puritanical a lot to go in for such cuntishly totemic specatcles as these. The trouble with such traditional folkways of induction, as Reg himself was explaining to me after the adjournment of that first meeting, was that they tended to solidify the individual's sense of solidarity with the group to the detriment of his sense of solidarity with the cause in whose sole service the group had been ostensibly instituted; and that on this account they were to be shunned in favour of such practices as honed his Arsenalophobia qua object worthy of perfection as a thing-in-itself. For the very raison d'etre of the Arsenal-Bashers' Association, Reg said, consisted not in providing the individual Arsenal-basher with a contingent feeling of warm-and-blokey fellowship with others more or less unfavourably disposed to Arsenal, but in providing him with a forum in which he might test the limits of his Aresnalophobia by contriving ever-more unpalatable scenarios in which he should be faced with a choice between renouncing his Arsenalaphobia and renouncing his devotion to some other cause, now newly conceived as being in competition with the former. TBS (Reg said), the lone Arsenalophobe might just as readily contrive such scenarios on his own, in the privacy of his closet, but in this setting they could always be written off on the spot as mere pipe dreams [The private Arsenalophobe who, at half-time, makes a pact with the Devil to offer up the life of his cat Tippy in exchange for an Arsenal defeat cheerfully serves up Whiskas to this self-same Tippy as the credits are rolling at match's end (so Reg)]; whereas, declaimed in public, to an audience of one's peers, they immediately materialised as de facto pledges, as declarations that must be owned up to in deed as well as in word. The efficacy of this almost criminally simple self-selective induction process, according to Reg, was attested to by the club’s staggering attrition rate; by the fact that he, Reg, an official Arsenal-Basher of a mere two years’ standing, was the senior member of the North London chapter, every single bloke Jack of his 20 his fellow class-of-’04-’ers having in the meantime jumped ship at the provocation of some other member's remark that, in his (the deserter’s) view, had ‘gone too far,’ that had, in other words, extended the imaginary frontiers of Arsenalophobia beyond his own threshold of palatability. Well, it should come as no surprise to the reader that, mine own threshhold being equivalent to that of a man born without taste buds, I was assured a bright future in the club from the very start. I arrived at the Ninja at a quarter-past eight on that Thursday night in late January to find the lads huddled secretively, mafioso-style, around a solitary table in a tenebrous, smoke-congested room to the rear of the main taproom. The dimness of the lighting and the thickness of the smoke conspired to render all assembled practically invisible; you could barely make out the outlines of heads and shoulders, let alone specific phiz-features, and I managed to single out Reg himself only as a raspy old-codgerly voice emanating from the vicinity of a glowing ember of cigar ash hovering a foot or two above the far end of the table: 'Ah, our potential new recruit. Have a seat. The fun is only just beginning. [I sat down at the only unoccupied place at the table, about halfway towards the back.] You were saying, Jake, that if you were in the market for a liver transplant...'

'...Yeah,' a voice directly across from me took over, 'I was saying that if I were in the market for a liver transplant, and the first available donor turned out to be a recently-deceased Jans Lehmann, I'd submit to the operation...' [Disgruntled murmurs of JFC! and Move back to Highbury, YFC! issuing from every corner of the room] '...No, no hear me out, lads. I'm saying that I'd submit to the operation...but that on the day of my release from hospital, I'd get hold of a butcher's knife and cut the offending organ out of my abdomen samurai style, with my own two hands, in the full clarity of consciousness.'

[Applause and Huzzahs all round.]

(Reg): 'Not bad, Jake, not bad, that one. Couldn't have done much better myself. Question is, can our new boy, Rugby, top it?'

With the posing of this question, all stogie and fag tips swivelled towards me. I gots to admit my schphincter had enjoyed moments of lesser elasticity than those first butcher's-dozen seconds in which I was obliged to frame my inaugural anti-Arsenal squib for the Bashers. But by and by it (my schpincter) pulled itself taut as I reflected that I had, after all, and in no less public a forum (viz. this here very blog), already long since hefted the destruction of Arsenal against no less ponderous a counterweight than the survival of the human race itself, and had found the latter decidedly wanting; and that hence, the mildest calumny I could improv was likely to go far with this lot, rather like even the scrawniest astrounaut's midfield kick at a lunar stadium. So, before I'd even thought the sentence through to the end, I commenced:

'If Thierry Henry were engaged to be married to my little sister...' (Of course, I didn't have a little sister, but they didn't know that.)

[Expectant Harrumph?s and Quite, quite...s]

'I wouldn't attend the wedding...'

[A chorus of Nyeeeeah!s accompanied, in my mind's okies, by the equivocating oscillation of 20 downward-orientated palms]

'...Even if...the wedding was to take place in Mallorca, and the groom, Monsieur Henry, offered to fly me there in my own personally chartered jet complete with jacuzzi and wet bar.'

[Applause, Huzzahs, finger-whistles and Arribas all round; and at a volume sufficient to provoke the barman to step into the room and shout, 'Would you cunts mind keeping it down a bit in here? We're trying to watch Little Britain out front.']

Such was the field-voiding extent of the triumph of this squib, that on the basis of it alone, and on that very night, I was nominated for and elected to the office of Sergeant at Pints (the title borne by the bloke responsible for communicating the group's drink orders to the bar [the previous holder of the office having stormed out in a huff roughly ten minutes into the meeting, before I had even arrived]); and from that point forward, my rise within the club hierarchy was positively meteoric. Come the end of February, I was effectively Reg's right-hand man, having in the meantime been elected additionally to the post of Treasurer and secured memberships for two of my own nominees, Ronnie Livingstone (of course) and Lou Philips, my Arsenal-bashing mate from the security desk at Proctologitex. I took the admission into our ranks of this latter bloke, Lou, as an especial proof of our leader's esteem and affection for me; for, you see, according to club rules, given that he hailed from St Albans, Lou was technically ineligible for membership in our chapter and should have applied to the Hertfordshire chapter instead. But upon my pointing out to the assembly that, as far as Lou and I knew, there was no Hertfordshire chapter of the Arsenal-Bashers, Reg flexed the muscle of his Presidential prerogative (much to the cuntsternation of the rest of the old guard) and decided that in this one exceptional case the rule barring membership to non-North-Londoners could be waived. ('Mind you,' he added sternly, bringing the tip of his stogie within singeing distance of Lou's goatee [facial hair reference No. 1!], 'If a second St-Albanian turns up, the two of you will have to go off and start your own chapter. Safety in geographical dispersion, not in numbers is the Arsenal-Basher's watchword.')

But for all the pull I had already acquired as of the end of February, I was then but as a petty duke-elector or princeling compared to the mighty Kaiser of North London Arsenalophobia that I was to become as of the adjournment of our most recent meeting, on the night before last.

But, not to let my capacity as a certifiably-board-certified-arch-Arsenalophobe trump my capacity as a would-be-board-certified-yarn-spinner, let me advert to the circumstances of that very evening. Much like a book group, our chapter is a roving assembly hosted cyclically by each of its members in turn at a venue of his choice and sited in his own district. Last Thursday night being my first turn at hosting, I naturally opted for my local sweet local, the Ape. In all modesty, I gots to say I really pulled out all the stops that night for the lads. Being a small-scale, single-room establishment, the Ape isn't really cut out for one of our mini-banquets. But by pushing six of the small two-person tables together, Mr Sedule and I managed to cobble together a single 20-person table, over which we draped a cloth printed with the crests and mottoes of all of the most celebrated and notorious English football clubs--or, rather, all of them save one. For at the dead centre or bull's-schphincter of the cloth, where the Arsenal crest had once been, there was a gaping rectangular void symbolising the destiny to which our confederacy collectively consigned the Gunners; and in the midst of this void I placed an eight-stemmed candelabrum in which were ensconced miniature wax effigies of such Arsenal luminaries as Arsène Wenger, Thierry Henry, Jans Lehmann, etc., each crowned, naturally, by the wick requisite to its eventual ceremonial immolation. Sure, there was something almost teejiously evocative of Bloke Fawkes Day about the whole setup, but that was hardly my fault; cos when you think about it, of the mere handful extant media of desecraction (piss, shit, jizzim, etc.), fire is the only one that can be employed in mixed company.

Anyway, after we had thus laid the table by half-past seven, I (proffering my own credit card as security for the bill) asked Mr Sedule to fry up a full gross of jalappeno poppers, so that none of us should be without solid sustenance at any point during the ensuing two-to- three-hour-long chinwag-cum-melee. At about ten-of-eight, the stalwarts started filing in, e.g.: Ned from Chelsea in his Lenny Pidgely shirt, Jake from Kentish Town in his Ruud van Nistelrooy shirt, and Mitch and Stu from Haringey (shirty alter egos: Michael Carrick and Paul Robinson, respectively). Then, at eight-o'-clock sharp came the second wave, e.g. Ronnie (stubbornly, and in flagrant violation of club rules, flying the shirtage of Sunderland's Stephen Wright), Lou (SAE: Kevin Campbell [West Brom]), Steve from Enfield (SAE: Petr Cech). Finally, at ten past, just as I was on the point of exercising my unofficial-yet-presumably-uncontestable right-hand-man's prerogative of calling the assembly to order, Reg himself staggered in, stogie-less, visibly harried, knackered and unshaven, and sporting a pair of Lennonesque sunglasses in addition to his usual Gareth Southgate shirt (along with shoes and trousers, natch--just like the rest of us. [By no means would I have the reader take the Ape for one of those trouser-optional sorts of establishments, or the Bashers for a group that swing that way, so to speak.]). With an imperious-yet-seemingly-gormless jerk of his right hand, Reg seated himself at the head of the table and thereby brought the ambient hubub to a well-nigh pin-drop-audible hush. According to custom, Mitch, our balding 38-year-old bespectacled Secretary--and, incidentally, our senior member by a purely chronological reckoning--was the first to speak:

‘The first order of business, lads, is to frame a reply to a query posted to us by the public relations liaison of our South London chapter, which query reads as follows: "Just what sort of public spin should be given to our antipathy towards the team captain, Thierry Henry, in view of the fact that, as Monsieur Henry is a gentleman of colour, the aforesaid antipathy risks being misconstrued by the community at large as a manifestation of indurate racialism?"’

‘I say fuck the community at large if they don’t get what we’re about,' replies Dave 'the Baron' Ochs, a great 20-stone bloke with a voice like a bass tuba tuned to drop E. 'If the lot of 'em want to string me up from Nelson’s balls in Trafalgar Square ’cos they think I’m a racialist, it’s fine with me; I’ll breath my last cum-shooting breath with a clear conscience, knowing full well as I do now that I’d have had it in for TH even if he’d been born an albino and a direct descendant of King Alfred.’

‘Knee-deep as I am in awe of the Arsenalophobic purity of your animus towards Thierry, Dave,' says Jake, 'I have to confess that I’d hate him a smidge less if he were an Englishman instead of an accursed Frog. And on that note, I should like to know whether a nationalist spin is out of the question in connection with the double-aforesaid antipathy?'

'It's hardly out of the question,' avers Steve. 'But in an Englishman's thesaurus the phrase taking the piss out of the French stands pretty much cheek-by-jowl with the phrase shooting at sitting canards. Why waste our time hard-bashing Thierry Henry's Frenchness when we could be directing the full force of our cudgels against the soles of the sorely underpersecuted national affiliation of the Professor himself, the fucking Monacans, er...Monacoans...er...Monacoese. Help me out here, Ronnie.'

Ronnie shrugs in an attitude of frank gormlessness.

(Steve again): 'Well, that's a strike against their pea-sized principality in itself: Oh, aren't we all high and mighty? We've got our pockets flush with revenues from our casinos, our national vanity stoked with worldwide envy of our Hollywood royal family; we're too good to waste a piddling .0000000001 per cent of our gross domestic product on coming up with a national epithet that's pronounceable by the average yob in the Anglophone street--'

'--Yes, yes, yes, I catch you, and I sympathise,' interjects Jake. 'But need I remind you that, although Arsène Wenger did indeed make his name as a player with Monaco, he was in fact born and reared in the Franco-German border city of Strasbourg, and that hence by nationality he is not, properly speaking, a Monacoan--or whateverean--but an Alsatian--'

'--So you're saying he is, in fact, a kind of of dog?' (So Steve.) 'Well, that's infinitely richer. Here, Arsène! Fetch me my slippers, Arsène. There's a gooooood boy. Let me scratch you behind the ears. Oh, I wuuuuuuuuv you, my wittle Arsène.'

My own policy in such boisterous group-chinwags as are exemplified by the one to hand is (at least when I'm afforded the luxury of doing so) to hold myself aloof from the general brouhahah until I've properly sussed out its intellectual temperature and have adjusted the kinetics of my own faculties accordingly, such that, by the time I catch sight of what in vulgar parlance is known as an in, I may rest more or less assured of leaving all and sundry assembled trailing in my spiritual dust. Well, by the time Steve was on to figuring AW as Rin Tin Tin's kinsbitch, I was running full apace of the train of the convo, and was within jumping distance of the boxcar door of my in. Thus I sprang:

'You're both shooting well wide of the co-jones of the Professor's Achilles heel. Just consider for a second the graphic significance of his forename, Arsène. Chop off the accent grave and the final unvoiced e and add an a and an l, and you've got in full the name of the very club he's managing. Can we, from the most astronomical degree of remove from the blackboard, chalk up the proximity of the two names to sheer coincidence? I think not. Obviously, Monsieur or Herr Wenger's stint at Monaco was simply a stepping stone in his progress towards the attainment of his current post. Obviously, from the very naissance of his nipperhood, when he was still wearing footed pajamas, he was aiming to become manager of this club. Can't you just picture his governess or nanny asking him, circa 1952: What do you want to be when you grow up, little Arsène? And him responding, I want to be the manager of Arsenal football club. Oh my! says the nanny, you are a precociously ambitious little lad; you'll be getting an extra ration of whipped cream with your blancmange at lunchtime today. And just ponder for a moment the sheer cuntish single-minded perversity of the whole enterprise, and its cuntishly protracted timescale.’

This squib doesn't go over half as well as I hoped--in fact, assumed--it would do. Ned, the only one who bothers to comment on it at all, looks dubious. ‘I’m no fan of the Professor, but even if it is true he wanted to coach Arsenal just cos his name was Arsène—which I very much doubt—I don’t see how it can be used as a strike against him. These Shandyan sorts of bios are fivepence a dozen in the world of sport, and they’re a publicity agent’s wet dream. Did you ever hear, for example, of that American blokess who decided to become a professional swimmer when she learnt her last name meant Esther Williams in Greek?’

(YFCT): ‘No.’

‘Well, she’s practically living off the royalties from the story in her retirement.’

‘Might I remind you, gentlemen,' interjects our Secretary, 'that while the two of you are busy splitting the chlorinated cunt-hairs of the practitioner of a sport that is perforce of no concern to us, there’s a bloke down in Bermondsey or Southwark waiting with bated breath for an answer to his Thierry Henry question.’

‘Oh, fuck the guy in Bermondsey or Southwark,' spits the Baron with scornful stroppiness. 'The fact is, that even in trying to answer that original question, we were already just pissing alongside the third rail--or playing hide and seek with the 40-stone bloke in the gorilla costume--of this entire session.’

'By which you mean what?' rejoins Mitch with a poncily provocative, Dr-Evil-ish frown-cum-eyebrow-arch concisely significative of the utterance, I know as well as you do what you mean, but I can't imagine you've got the co-jones to bring it out into the open.

(The Baron:) 'I mean, your Ponciness, the Gunners' crossing the Channel into the running for the European Championship.'

(Mitch, trying futilely to keep his Mike Myers schtick going:) 'Oh, th-th-th-that old th-th-th-th-ing.'

(Ochs:) 'Cos I know full well there's at least four of five us sitting here right now who are on the point of pissing themselves in anticipation of being allowed to say...' He breaks off to draw a deep breath and to cross himself upside-down briskly, before resuming, in a daemonic larynx-shredding falsetto fit to make your flesh crawl, 'Shouldn't we all get behind Arsenal now that they're the only surviving English Champions club?' [Another five-second-long interval elapses whilst he downs half a pint to reclaim his selfhood from the forces of darkness he's just courageously suffered himself to channel. Then, in his organic bass tuba voice, he resumes:] 'Well, I say to these Judases and Benedict Arnolds in our midst, Speak now, or for ever hold your piss. But I warn you lot, for me and my shirt, no night'll be too long; the two of us don't know the meaning of the word "overtime".'

'I'll be the first,' says a bloke name of Cyril, who, in weighing in at 18 stone, is the only one amongst us who might even dream of emerging alive from the coda of a shirtfest with Ochs. 'This last month has been a time of great spiritual crisis for me. All along, from the moment when I joined up with the Bashers way back in January of ought-five, I've always thought of myself as a do-or-die Arsenalophobe. But since Chelsea were knocked out contention for the Champions Cup this year, I've begun not so much to question my Arsenalophobia as to become re-acquainted with my patriotism, with my Anglophilia. And I'm starting to wonder whether our club, under its current constitution, is really cut out to survive in this brave new world we've been living in since February 22, a world where Arsenal are the only representatives of the English fighting spirit on the continent.'

'So, you're saying,' Steve hazards, 'that we might as well pack it all in, disband, and--horribile dictu--encourage our dispersed membership to report to their respective local Gunners'-fan-club recruiting offices?'

'No, I'm simply suggesting that, out of respect for those of us who regard an Arsenal-spearheaded English UEFA championship as the least of eight evils, we should postpone our next meeting till Arsenal are eliminated from the rounds, or till May 17, whichever comes first.'

About midway through the preceding sentence, I start to sense through the table and the hams of my hands a vibration such as you might feel during the initial seconds of a Richter-Level Nine earthquake, and notice that the surface of the Hoegaarden in my half-empty pint glass is gently seesawing a few degrees upwards and downwards of the parallel. Taking cognizance at once the catastrophe these signs portend, I spring to my feet just in time to catch hold of Ochs's canteloupe-circumfrenced, shirtbound right forearm, wrestle it back down to table level and throw the full weight of my arseward-orientated carcass on to it; whilst on Ochs's left flank Lou, having been likewise tipped off, does the same to the other forearm. During the next few seconds, as I'm fighting the opening round of an undoubtedly hopeless bout against Ochs's still shirtward-hankering sinews, I cry out as loudly as I can do, 'CODE PUCE, JIMMY!' in the general direction of the bar.

[TBC. (I hear the cry of the Ape.)]