The Party Animal Incident
By: Alex Markham
Tags: Short Story, Life Lessons, Fiction, Humor, Humour

Short story humour

Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay

It’s an inescapable fact, established and substantiated through years of personal experience, observation and habitual participation, that any social event will be enhanced and enlivened through the copious intake of alcohol.

In this current world of spin, conspiracy theories and fake news, this is not a view shared by everyone. Unfortunately, this includes my wife, Katherine. She believes my use of liquid inebriants to break down the societal barriers in my mind for the benefit of everyone’s enjoyment is not necessarily a good thing. This is a worldview shared by our seventeen-year-old son, Paul. I suppose that’s teenagers for you, ever the rebels.

That said, I have to grudgingly admit that my last escapade, one week ago, did not end entirely as intended. The ‘incident’ in question was spontaneous and isn’t spontaneity generally the best facilitator for an alcoholic-related shenanigan?

Whilst I can comprehend that not having blinding headaches, parched dehydration and a need to projectile vomit two or three times a week is a pleasing side effect of abstinence, these debilitating effects should also be considered as badges of honour. They demonstrate that a decent night out was had by all and provide an inclusive arena for shared suffering with those also afflicted following an entertaining evening’s ‘shenanigans’. No pain no gain, as they say.

I’ve not touched a drop for the past seven days. Since the ‘incident’. This is by way of the ‘incident’ resulting in my jaw needing to be reconstructed and wired up and my loving wife refusing my requests to attach a bottle of wine to the hospital feeding tube.

The additional impediment to a cheeky slug of soothing red liquid velvet is my incapacitation caused by the traction machine currently holding up my right leg inside a large plaster cast over a hospital bed. This effectively ends any ability to go to the wine fridge, corner shop or pub. Or anywhere for that matter, including calls of nature which are currently effected by means of an attached plastic bag for number ones and a plastic tray under my bum for the more uncongenial needs of nature. I won’t be sharing this specific result of the recent ‘incident’ as a badge of honour though.

So back to that night in question one week ago and the ‘incident’. We recently moved to a village called Little Bashford and we joined the local golf club. They were kind enough to invite us to the Christmas meal even though we had only been members for a week. The three of us poodled along to the dinner, arriving at 8pm on the dot as per the invite.

Image by bridgesward from Pixabay

I did promise Katherine, and Paul, I would not over-imbibe. I never said I wouldn’t drink anything, nor did I promise not to liven things up if it all became a tad stuffy. At the door, Katherine reminded me of her extracted promise from me to not ‘drink like a fish’ that night. “These are new friends and we should make a good impression,” she said.

Now in my defence, I’m not convinced that fish drink that much, so technically I didn’t break any promises. I know fish swim around in a lot of water but whether they actively gulp it all down like crazy water-holics is debatable. I have a vague recollection from school biology lessons, some thirty years ago admittedly, that some fish take in water through their skins by osmosis. Since this action is physically impossible for me, I felt my promise to not drink like a fish that evening was on safe ground. Or safe water in this case.

The Christmas meal was pleasant enough but the golfing set can be a little dry, in the sense of not amusing rather than there not being sufficient alcohol available. Katherine never told me not to drink, just to not drink too much. Like a fish does. Apparently.

We were offered a glass of bubbly on arrival. It would have been rude not to accept. New friends and all that. I managed to sneak in two more while Katherine was in the toilet and Paul chatted to someone from the Little Bashford Sunday league football team.

The 70s music played by an ancient DJ couldn’t have been better. None of that noise the kids listen to nowadays where you couldn’t hear the words and there was no discernible tune. No, the Golf Club obviously knew great music when they heard it. The evening had potential.

With Katherine (and Paul) watching over me, there was little opportunity to over-indulge at the dinner table. I had drunk one further glass of wine during starters before Katherine’s cool white hand moved over the glass rim with the word, “enough,” and her slitted eyes boring into mine.

The evening was proving the inescapable fact that events require prodigious intakes of alcohol to get swinging. People, especially the golf set, tend to be too hung up on appearances and polite chat. An attempt to brighten the evening with my highly amusing Daffy Duck tie and Bugs Bunny socks failed to ignite the conversation from beyond the price of housing and golf handicap numbers. I tried my emergency back-up plan of battery-operated flashing reindeer horns. Nothing. Then Paul stamped on them. Teenage hormones I guess.

Katherine struck up a friendship with a pleasant lady next to her. Paul, like the other half of my personal anti-alcohol praetorian guard, was deep into conversation with his football mate over the 4–4–2 and 4–3–3 formations and zonal marking.

I feigned an incipient prostate problem, age catching up on me and all that, and I made several trips to the toilet. Toilet was a clever euphemism for the bar where my own new best friend, Ted the barman, was happy to serve me a series of gin and tonics. I knocked back a couple on each ‘toilet run’.

By dessert I was feeling the love: that warm feeling of fuzzy uncoordinated ideas coupled with an intense reduction in any ability to focus or speak properly. The antique DJ had ratcheted up the music and some youngsters were bopping on the small dance floor area. My legs began to jiggle as Katherine and her new best friend chatted to each other. Paul and his team-mate moved onto the offside law and goal-line technology. They had forgotten about me.

On my next ‘toilet run’ I told Ted I was bored with gin diluted by tonic and wanted his best hard stuff: Tequila, neat. I don’t think I said it quite that way. It was more like “Em bored wiv sh…, hic, sh…, hic. Shin and chonic. Want yer bes’ stuff Teddy mate.”

He seemed unsure but acquiesced when I threatened to get on the bar counter and sing My Way. I told him I used to be in a band and was a good singer. This came out as, “I wash inna ban’ an’ wash a goo’ shingaa. Hic.”

He said the tequila was my last drink. As I put it away down the old hatch and it warmed my tubes like hot burning petrol, I had a brainwave. Although the good people here were very nice, they were clearly in need of a shot of entertainment. I was certain they would thank me for it later; I’d be the talk of the village. I did indeed become the talk of the village, and surrounding districts, although not entirely in the way I’d intended. I suppose that’s showbiz for you.

I’d guessed they didn’t have the funds for a live band so had hired this geriatric DJ instead, even if his musical selection of 70s disco classics was inspired. My past experience as the singer in a short-lived pub band in 1979 was the perfect foundation for me to give them the entertainment I was sure they craved. And deserved. What’s more, I would do it for nothing. That’s the kind of guy I am.

One of the problems of being young, like my son, is that they weren’t born when the best music was out. They had missed classics like: Boogie Oogie Oogie, Dance Dance Dance Yowsah Yowsah Yowsah, Disco Inferno and Copacabana by that genius of cool mellow, Barry Manilow. And of course, the greatest of them all, Do Ya Think I’m Sexy by Rod Stewart. What did youngsters today know about the joys of watching a grown man wearing skin-tight leopard-print leggings with a rolled-up sock tucked down his crotch while wiggling his bum at the audience? Rod was a showman par excellence. As was I, at that moment in my somewhat fogged brain.

I approached the superannuated DJ by way of bouncing along one side wall to stay upright. This would be no impediment to my imminent success as the evening singer, entertainer and dancer once things kicked off. Even better, my wife and son would get to see the benefits of alcohol-induced entertainment live rather than hearing about it second hand. A funny story never sounds as good when it’s retold: you have to be there.

I asked the fossilised DJ for Do Ya Think I’m Sexy and he told me to something off. I didn’t catch the first word over the sound of I Want to Kiss You all Over. I think he said funk which made perfect sense considering the excellent 70s disco music he was playing.

He eventually relented when I fell onto his keyboard and accidentally changed the play list to kids’ party tunes. Once We Are the Dinosaurs started, the dance floor filled with sugared-up six-year-olds. He promised to put Do Ya Think I’m Sexy on if I went away. I think he used the phrase funk off again. He was one cool DJ, despite his advanced age.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

My entertainment needed to be be good and I had it all planned in my spontaneously brilliant entertainer’s mind. I had decided to do a highly amusing dance and mime routine to that wonderful Rod Stewart song. I’d spotted some props on one of my many toilet runs. I’d become lost when I really did need to go and I’d found myself in the cleaner’s room. I’ve since kept quiet about what I left in the bucket before I’d realised it was not the toilet.

I retired to the cleaner’s room and got ready, avoiding close proximity to the aforementioned bucket. I waited for three more songs before hearing that classic introduction of Rod croaking out sugar sugar over the top of a whining hypnotic synthesiser riff. This was my moment: the Little Bashford Golf and Country Club Christmas dinner was about to come to life.

I skidded out of the little room and dived over and up onto the dining table. There was no stage, this was the next best thing. I had cleverly placed the head of a mop onto my head to simulate Rod’s exotically-styled spiky tresses and I’d removed my trousers, underpants and shoes for a pair of discarded woman’s pantyhose tights in light brown. I’d found them in the bin in the cleaning room. The tights were a little smeared with the remains of the cleaner’s take-away curry from yesterday, but the show must go on and all that.

I grooved sexily on the table top and wiggled my bum in Katherine’s new friend’s face as Rod asked everyone if they wanted his body. Her eyes were fixed on a piece of stringy tandoori chicken hanging from between my legs which was possibly the reason for her expression of repugnance. It had to be this rather than the sight of a fifty-two-year-old man wiggling a less than conditioned bum while wearing partially transparent women’s tights.

Neither was it the several damp cloths that I’d plunged down the front of my tights to give me an impressively sexy lump. Or the subsequent wet patch around my crotch area. But as I said, needs must and you go with what you have. That’s entertainment folks.

My act with greeted with stunned stupefaction, such was the brilliance of the impersonation.

A sadly rapid and premature end to the evening’s entertainment was effected by a plate of tiramisu. A waiter had thoughtlessly, and with a total lack of prescience, left it in the centre of my stage next to the Christmas pudding and double-cream option. I believe this was soaked in brandy, but sadly I didn’t get to find out. I slipped in the tiramisu dish and fell forward and face first to the floor. I didn’t hear the sickening crunch of my jaw hitting the ceramic tiled floor, luckily. Nor did I feel any pain such was my level of alcoholic anaesthesia.

I got stuck with my legs in the air, one at right angles to the other, wedged between Mr Fred Diggens, the Golf Society President, and Mrs Hilda Diggens, Little Bashford’s senior magistrate.

And so I find myself here, one week later, one leg up on a pulley system, face set in a metal harness and a tube leading to a bag with a nasty yellow liquid filling up fast.

I do have a clear head and a general feeling of floating well-being, despite the lack of alcohol. I guess that would be the morphine.

I wonder if the nurses would like a song? I might not be able to move my mouth, but I’m sure I could manage a pretty good throaty hum. The show must go on?

Other stories from me showing a disturbing trend for music and alcohol-induced mayhem: