Four Days.
Warning: The characters in this blog are trained alcoholics. Many brain cells were violently violated during the occurrence of these events. Without cause, without just, without a shred of common decency. Just wall to wall filth mongering.
I type to you now, through my conveniently attached, mildly nimble yet somewhat rebellious fingers, on the tail end of my 6th double shot Ballentines on the rocks. It’s been awhile between textual drinks but, by jesus jumped up fiddling murmuring drooling child mongering (2nd use of this word but what a word!) old Christ, it has most certainly NOT been awhile between real drinks.
Two out of my top three humans came to see me on the weekend week ago. And when I say they came to see me, I quite obviously mean they came for completely different reasons. One needed my motorcar and the other needed my house. But apart from that, it was all about the big fella. That’s me.
The first fiend, I collected from Melbourne airport towards midnight on Thursday night. I have changed his name to protect his guilt and he will be referred to henceforth as Benn. Benn and I have been best mates since 1988 and that makes everything so very tiresome. Tiresome for everybody. Except for me. And Ben… I mean Benn. Our brains have taken turns metaphorically spooning each other for the better part of twenty years. And it was just like old times as we put away a bottle of scotch, told wild stories and played video games until 5am Friday.
Just like it has happened so many times before, I woke to Bennn standing at the foot of my bed and murmuring anti-buzz words like relax, natural and wet. With the reflexes of Garfield on slimfast shakes, he managed to dodge whatever item I hurled at him from my bedside table. Like a Tarantino film, we somehow time warped to the part where we’ve buried the body and are in the car headed towards the other side of Melbourne to collect the van he just acquired. A 1978 Transit. Stop. Check yourself. Now wreck yourself as I tell you again. A 19fuckin78 Ford fuckin Transit. The heckling license that I’ve acquired after enduring over 20yrs of friendship with this man allowed me to say things like, what in the sphincter of hell are you thinking? and how you haven’t yet been picked off by a bird of prey yet, I’ll never know. My words were a shot of whiskey splashing against a mountain side though. Pointless, wasteful, inconsequential AND inconse-Quench-al, (see what I did there? Well aren’t you fuckin special).
So we paid off the old omni-toothed slagathor who up until this turning point in the earth’s history had kept this apparent abomination of a motor carriage a very well considered secret from the general populace and we convoyed, (LOVE the convoy), back to the deer in the headlights city of Melbourne. We checked into the luxury loft suite at the exclusive Sebel Hotel on Collins St. Yeah, exclusive to my ass! A quick reminisce to the bottle of scotch from the night before inexorably lead to the decision of acquiring another bottle… post haste! The acquisition of said bottle was swift and homicide free, so refreshing.
After some choice communication to the other drinkers in the area, using my mobilised electronic telecommunications apparatus (named MKO… yeah, my phone is named Mary-Kate Olsen), we soon had a suite full of people that mattered. They mattered because they were there. They mattered because they were with us. In any other circumstance, I wouldn’t even spit on them. But because they were with us, I considered, at numerous intervals in the free flowing conversaries, to spit right up all over each and every one of them. Without pause or concern. Because they mattered.
The bottle of scotch and several beers passed by like a tortoise on a Harley FatBoy passing a hare in a wooden box in the ground. And before we knew it, and seriously, it was before we actually knew it, well I can’t speak for Benn but I was already at the let’s talk about the universe or get in a fight with a wise-cracking midget phase… YOU know what I’m talking about, we arrived at a pub in St Kilda. And that’s a bit of a paradox in itself, because a midget cracking wisely is hardly wise at all wouldn’t you agree? Anyway, I continued to spiral in and out of awareness for the remainder of the evening.
Apart from the time I woke up driving in ‘98, I couldn’t have been more upset with my form Saturday morning. I woke, in the hotel suite, on a perfectly extracted sofa bed, in a bathrobe fit for an anorexic garden gnome and the taste of dried up upchuck on the inside of my cheeks. It was one of those hangovers where you tell yourself you’re never going to drink again. Again apparently having the time equivalent of about 20hrs in this instance.
I dropped Bennnn off at his freshly acquired Ford oh shit an explosion from that devil spawn of the seventies would surely kill us all Transit and immediately made vehicular haste for Melbourne airport once more. You see, it was now time to collect the other from my top three humans. I have changed her name to protect her guilt and she will be referred to henceforth as Zoee.
Unlike me, Zoeee did NOT have a hangover that bore the pain of a thousand ear rapes. In fact, quite the opposite, (don’t ask me what the opposite of an ear rape is). She was genuinely excitable to begin with, she was packed to the gills with coffee and she had just been on a plane. Any girl who’s just disembarked a mammoth winged dildo is almost always the complete opposite of lethargic. I gently and quietly hugged her hello. I was barely a nano-second beyond commencing the disengagement of my drive away from the airport hug when she lunged a free hand towards the car stereo and turned it up as loud as it would go. “Why the fuck do I keep her in the top 3?!” I fiercely pondered. She then cast me a look of a dog that just proudly ate its own vomit. “Ah yes, that’s why. Atta girl”.
The show was a raging success and the Ballaratarians put on the best crowd Zoeeeee had ever wrestled before. Meanwhile, I still felt like crap in its purest form from the preceding night. It was now 11:30pm and it was time to attend the wrestling after-party. I drove us there without a doubt in my mind that we’d walk in, Zoeeeeeee would network a little and then we go back home and watch cartoons. We brought a two litre coke and a bottle of Ballentines scotch… because… you know, it’s rude to turn up to a house party without anything at all. Upon arrival, it was drawn into sharp relief that there wasn’t a single drinking receptacle in the entire kingdom of earth. Did we lose a war?! Well, not a problem. It took little more than a silent and agreeable nod between us to ascertain the only way forwards was to pour out half the coke onto the ground and empty the contents of the full scotch bottle into the remaining vacant half. I didn’t go near it. It was 12:15am and my head was throbbing. My bones were sore. I just wanted to sleep. By 12:18am I had taken three hearty swigs of the rocket fuel. I turned to Zoeeeeeee, with the look of a 4 year old who just got a tonka truck for wetting the bed, and proclaimed with unmatched glee, “I’M BACK BABY!”. I don’t remember much beyond that except for the fact I had a fan club and almost puked on the biggest billiard table I have ever fucking seen in my life. Either that or my eyes were so pickled by all the alcohol that they had actually shrunk and therefore the table just had the appearance of being epic.
Sunday morning was, to say the least, difficult. Sunday lunch was a little easier. Forcing down a pint in the mid afternoon was downright nigh impossible and took the better part of an hour for the one beer each. There was nothing for it. We were defeated. We conceded. It was time to just go home, have some water or tea and finally watch those cartoons.
But with great drinking power, comes great responsibility to drink irresponsibly. On the drive home, ZoeEeEe spotted, what seemed the biggest Dan Murphy’s liquor store on this side of the cosmos. I’m not sure how the car parked itself but we were inside bowing to the biggest bottle of bourbon I have ever fuckin seen. I’ve never gone from complete hilarious giddiness to pure unadulterated fear and back again in such a short span of time in my life. For a while I thought we were never going to make it out with our purchase. Then I thought we’ll never make it out at all... ever. Anyway, I’m fairly certain the only reason we didn’t walk out of there with the gallon of bourbon was because of the global economic crisis and the fact my car can’t transport anything heavier than my car itself. So we did the next best thing. Bought three bottles of wine and a litre of vodka.
And that’s how Stella got her groove back.
Ps, the van is actually really good and so was the wrestling!
