A few days ago we got in a fight. It was exciting and sexy because I personally did not get that badly hurt. The situation was that it was Matt’s birthday night and I was standing outside of a club with Matt and Max and JJ (who is a small Liberal Democrat who has a beard) and Ella (who was monged off her face on horse tranquilisers and thus posed no threat to anybody), when this dude wearing a suede trenchcoat started on us. I would like to reaffirm the fact that he was indeed wearing a suede trenchcoat. He also had a perfectly ovular head with fuzzy hair and reminded me of some dude I met ages ago who I nicknamed ‘Coconut Paul’. Because of this he is referred to in this blog as “Trenchcoat Paul”.
I think that Trenchcoat Paul thought that wearing a suede trenchcoat to a nightclub was a good fashion advice and because of this I reckon that he must have been in a lot more fights than we had. This put us at a disadvantage because were all a combination of drunk (me Max Matt JJ), short (JJ) jewish (JJ and Max) tired after a danceoff (me) or The Birthday Boy (Matt) and were in no mood to be pummelling each other into meatballs. But Trenchcoat Paul – as well as being dressed like Neo – had clearly had some kind of martial arts training and I think was probably in fact hacked into the Matrix the entire time. At one point he bended time and ran around the sides of the wall just to prove he could. And then JJ stabbed him in the head with a cigarette.
But I am getting ahead of myself. We had previously met Trenchcoat Paul back in the club itself. Detail: the club was the union official bar and was called the Purple Turtle. People who go to the union mostly tend to be 40 year old men who look like dentists and who go onto the dancefloor with their shirts tucked into their pants– the future politicians of the future. I have to describe this to you so you understand how just god-damn outrageous we all were by going there. I mean, we were all YOUNG and we didn’t even care about the standards of acceptable dress. I mean, it was really dark inside and I was in fact wearing a pair of huge white sunglasses that I had stolen from a girl! That’s right, sunglasses indoors! How absolutely absurd! When the bartender saw me he went WHAT and his monocle fell right off into his vermouth. But I didn’t care. On the dancefloor – which actually played quite good tunes, beeteedoubleyou – there was this dentist looking guy with a long square head who looked absolutely monged on something or other, and was performing a dance that I can only describe as ‘Dad-thrash-sambo-fusion’. Anyway after watching him in action for five minutes I decided to start imitating him; every single kick jump twist twirl and shimmy I copied to perfection. When he tugged at his sleeves, I stroked my arms (I was wearing a tshirt because I am young and rebellious). When he paused for breath I paused for breath. When he jumped up and hung onto the ceiling I ran around in circles as I couldn’t reach. As it turned out, I was actually bloody good at this mimicry, and after ten minutes there was a huge empty space in the middle of the dancefloor with just me and him shimmying in some kind of cosmic display of awesome duplicity.
This continued for about twenty five minutes, all said (in case you were wondering, the answer is ‘I was drunk’); it got to the point that it was a matter of pride for me to beat this guy at dad-thrash-sambo-fusion, and nothing else mattered – not the cheers of my friends, not the fact that I was nearly passing out due to dehydration, not the fairly ok looking girl wearing a hat (A GIRL WEARING A HAT IN A NIGHTCLUB HOW ABSURD AND I WAS WEARING SUNGLASSES: MENTAL) who walked past, and certainly not Trenchcoat Paul, who started kicking me about halfway through. I don’t know whether it was because my dancing partner was his friend or because he was just a cock, but for about two minutes he started kicking my quite hard in the bum while I was doing a shimmy. He then stole my sunglasses and ran off until Matt went and got them. In the meantime, my dance-partner finally gave up and left the dancefloor; I did three rounds of the Macarena and thirty seconds of the funky chicken to show my utter domination, and then I staggered sideways towards the bar. We went outside to get some air as I was pretty much a sweaty wreck.
BUT WHO SHOULD SUDDENLY LEAP OUT OF THE SHADOWS? That’s right, Trenchcoat Paul our Ninja adversary. When I saw him I was like ‘Ohh shiiiit’ as he looked a right badass in his coat that was buttened right up to his second chin. When he saw us he started saying ‘oioioi’ or something similar and kind of rotating towards us. Things were said and he suddenly thrashed out and hit Matt in the eye. Matt was understandably annoyed at this and started shouting ‘WHAT WAS THAT ALL ABOUT EH WHAT’ and then everybody started pushing everybody else and talking loudly. At this point Trenchcoat Paul’s mate, who was a lot more strong looking than Trenchcoat Paul and was wearing a tshirt and had stubble, jumped into the fray and started swinging his arms about. I believe he called Matt a ‘posh wanker’ which I think is funny because Matt is basically working class scum and if it wasn’t for the fact that we both did English I probably wouldn’t even talk to him. Anyway Stubbly Frederick swung out and he punched me in the side of the head. It wasn’t that bad really, kind of like having a small hard piece of bread being pressed really hard against you, momentarily. What was terrible though was that my sunglasses fell off. I saw this and I was like NARGH and I leapt into action and kind of touched him, although at this point he was off punching Max in the face. Eventually the bouncer, who was a fat dude who had watched most of the events from the sidelines, stepped in and squished Trenchcoat Paul, and we all grabbed Stubbly Frederick, who pinched my arm and gave me a bruise. After that they fucked off and we all wandered home, going on about how shit they were and how awesome we all were and about how swollen up Matt’s face was (he looked like the stay puft monster). We also had to drag Ella back as she was pretty much comatose herself and hadn’t even noticed what was going on, even though she’d been sitting on a step directly opposite (lol, drugs). I was feeling quite pleased that I managed to avoid shaming myself as I had always assumed that had any threat of violence ever come up I would have taken one look, my eyes like saucers, and then turned 180 degrees and run off into the night, arms flailing. However not only did I not run away, I also kind of walked back and forth during the battle and yelled a bit. I sure am a badass. Anyway I compiled a small dossier documenting the various damage levels dealt by both sides:
(by the way if you are wondering about the relative ugliness of this picture compared to Every Other Picture I Have Ever Made For This Blog and my use of the IMPACT font, essentially it's because I have realised that I am indeed a caged fighter at heart, not some wishy washy poncy artist and thus I can't be bothered wasting my time on aesthetics - I HAVE A WAR TO FIGHT)
Of course, being male, after the fight itself comes the most important and – some say – difficult task; that of exaggerating it to the most cinematic, heroic and exciting levels of danger and derring-do for our captive audiences back at college. This isn’t as easy as it sounds as girls are actually quite good at noticing that we are talking shit and there is an innate sense of honour within men that states that we can only really stretch things to realistic levels. So we weren’t allowed to say that they were packing knives or that we managed to beat them to the floor. However we are totally allowed to play up the degrees of our injuries and then say ‘No, it’s fine’ modestly and limp off when women say things like ‘Oh you poor dear’. That. Is. Allowed.
For Matt, who had a huge shiner, this is easy. This task it somewhat harder for me because my wounds are at worst superficial and at best non-existent. This issue is summed up best by the fact that I was just informed that our resident nosy student hack Leila is already ‘writing an article’ on our awesome fight for the ‘newspaper’ the Oxford Student. Disregarding the utter pointlessness of it AND the fact that this blog probably has a wider and more attractive readership than the Oxford Student and thus the incident is already covered, she hasn’t even bothered to interview me! Lazy journalism. I guess a small red bump of sore skin underneath the hairline isn’t sexy enough to make in the Oxford Student. But just because you can’t see the wounds doesn’t mean that they aren’t there. The mental trauma I have suffered is a thousand times worse than all of the small faint forearm bruises in the world.
Ever since that fateful night I have been too afraid to leave my room. Stubbly Frederick’s gravelly face, the horrific death-scream he used to lull us down, the smooth horror of Trenchcoat Paul’s trenchcoat thing… they haunted my nights. I dreamt that I was walking along that same street, wearing that same tshirt and those same sunglasses, when suddenly a bull with the Frederick’s face leapt out of the darkness and chased me. I tried to run but my legs had been replaced with small Korean children who were too busy making Disney wallets to move and so I crawled along with my hands but my fingernails were ripped out by the pavement and then my entire body started to glow with PURE FEAR; then I turned round and I saw trenchcoat Paul and he wasn’t just a man with a trenchcoat any more, he was motherfucking NEO and then he looked at me and said ‘There is no spoon, and I’m gonna KICK YOUR ASS FOOL’ and then he jumped in the air and the entire universe revolved around him and then I woke up in a cold sweat. I spent days on end sitting in my room in a wifebeater and greasy jeans, drinking whiskey from the bottle and watching reruns of ‘To Catch A Predator’. Their faces haunted me. My friends tried to pry me out of it; ‘You gotta pull yourself our of this slump, Tom or else they’ve really won!’… ‘You’ve changed, Tom’… ‘Please, for your family’s sake, stop this, you are destroying yourself and everything that you stand for’… but I wasn’t listening. They just didn’t understand. I threw a bottle of whiskey at Ella’s head when she tried to make me come shopping with her. After licking the walls a bit, she too fled in fear. I was alone. And as I lay on the floor, throwing up and semi-comatose, at my very rock bottom, alone and unloved, suddenly a ray of light streamed through the window and struck me. It was a revelation; it was rapture. I had to take my life into my own hands.
And so the next day I got up early and went into training. I did I think about 10000 pressups and then just to prove to myself that I could do it I did another 10000, and then I did some skipping for a bit and then I pretty much hit the gym and pumped iron for about eight hours and then I hit the punch bag so hard that it exploded, and then I ran all around Oxford, and all of the children in the streets saw me and chased after me cheering, until I got to the steps leading up the main hall and I ran up them and danced about with my arms in the air cheering to the soundtrack of ‘Hearts on Fire’. The day after I went back to that bar and I found that guy. “Matt,” I screamed into the air “I WILL AVENGE YOU!” I was strong. I was unbreakable. I was A MONSTER. I think that the results speak for themselves frankly.
Yeahh I rule
sigh.
Here we are, swinging hammers and hauling 2x4s, building a new home for my little Son, Moon, and Stars:
