Bullingdon boy.

I wanted to be the kind of cool guy that took thizzz many Budwiesers, drunk all night and all day, didn’t care that I couldn’t talk and nobody was listening, butted in anyway with something I forgot to mention five minutes ago, but redeemed myself by falling down a hill and going to live in a rose bush.  Stargazing. Oblivious to the higher transcendence of light and darkness. Fuck the rose bush as well. I was off my chumper.

It was a wakeup call. I concentrated my fury on the back to basics of drinking more and spending less time on the frivolity of eating, sleeping and studying. Thing went missing – a tooth or two and my nose went on the slide. Remodelling, with a pavement touch, it was called by the avante garde. I went about it with a religious zeal. Pavements had been here longer than me. God put them there for a purpose.  

Stabilisers on the four-poster bed didn’t hurt. Plastic sheets were a bug-bear. I was used to the better things in life. Suffering was necessary.  I became God’s messenger. His message was that pavements were an urban rainforest and needed nurturing. Some guys I hated because they ‘d girlfriends. Pavements were there for me. Unpretentious, they made me bow down and bite humility. You also looked smaller lying down. Women generally preferred the shorter type of guy. Live there long enough and I knew she’d come to me as long as I stayed off the crack in the pavement.

‘You think this is a joke?’ My brother was looking down at me from a great height, but he was standing on the cracks of two ill-matched slabs outside our little mews house.

‘What being sober?’ I smirked.

Relapse was never a problem. You just lie down in a recovery position. Pavements are god’s plants. When you start looking they’re everywhere for you. Three months later I bagged a girlfriend. She was playing Pan’s pipes on the pavement with bottles of Crystal, drinking one putting it down, quaffing another. The type of behaviour that gave Bullingdon a good name. It was the type of party I was always invited to, but never attended because I was invited. The kind of party that needed people like me because everybody was too sober and scared of saying the wrong kind of thing to The Poof, The Paki or The Lessy with the body shaped like a trombone. They were fake drunks that needed to be led into the state of true drunkenness. I liked horses and was an animal lover. But there’s a place and time for a silver-backed gorilla and it wasn’t a social occasion.  There behaviour was predictable. Well documented by people like David Attenborough.

‘I’m going to punch you,’ he said, for calling his fat girlfriend a dog.

I might have made barking noises and imitated her high squeaking voice. Everyone laughed. I was funny. Like most comedians I’d found a format and stuck to it, in an increasingly higher and squeaker voice, until I was physically assaulted. I found myself, not unpleasantly, stretched out, lying on a pavement.  There may have been a police man, but they don’t count, being such Lilliputian people.  

I tried to explain the theory of dumb animal lovers. I think he was a drunk as well, because he talked the language. But he was the worst kind of mealy-mouthed drunk that stayed sober for Jesus. A God-bothering sober-drunk.    

‘Forget all that Crucifixion and Resurrection shit,’ I told him. ‘Did He or did He not turn water into wine?’

It was my comedy routine, but spaced out and speeded up. The same line and the same variation. He wasn’t laughing. God-botherers never do.

I was sent by mumsie on a six-month sabbatical. That epiphany of walking out the door, with practically nothing but a wallet full of credit cards and living for forty days and forty nights in the world of pubs. Women tried to entice me, but I needed a good soaking to get back to normal. As God knows you’ve got to reach a low before you reach that high. I made a blood pact with Him, stuck to the toilet seat and had lost all strength or desire to move again.

‘Davarus. Davarus. You in there?’ I heard his voice outside the toilet door. He’d work for me in his Father’s vine fields.

Resurrection doesn’t come to the anointed any better or easier than a bowel movement. Sobriety and responsibility of this great nation beckoned. ‘I think you’ve got the wrong toilet,’ I told Him.

He would not so easily thwarted. He pushed open the door.  I stumbled to meet him. One question played on my lips. ‘Did you, or did you not, turn water into wine?’

He admitted he had.

I respectfully pointed out if he couldn’t stay sober what chance would I have. And I told him straight. ‘Stop following me about. It’s creepy. Get a job or something if you’re bored.’

God’s wisdom prevailed. ‘We’re all in this together,’ He said.

‘After 2000 years people might jump at the chance of believing in the Crucifixion and the Resurrection stuff, but they’ll never believe that claptrap.’ I didn’t want to argue, but I did want a good drink.  Then I seen the light.