It is a rainy night, so we are sitting in a garden pub in the center. Nobody really seems to know about this place, despite the fact that it’s near the main throughways. The front of the place looks like it was decorated by a guy who flips crack houses. But the garden is nice and usually quiet. We had a few things to talk about, so we sit, get drinks, and begin a low conversation in earnest.
When I look up an hour later, the place is packed. Nobody is over the age of 18 or so. They are drinking and smoking and looking fantastic, ticking all the requirements of 18-year-olds. They start out a little tentatively, but a growing buzz comes from their impossible young energy. My friend and I continue our discussion but as the kids’ shenanigans increase, so must our volume.
‘So, I don’t think she ever really loved me!’ my friend screams at me from 10 inches away.
‘Do we ever really love anybody?’ I scream back.
We nod gravely.
I sort of remember having this kind of energy. There were 25 cent draft nights, guzzling enough plastic cups of urine-warm beer to understand immortality, a perception which was heartily slaughtered four hours later while I was heaving my soul into a trapper keeper in my dorm room and then drinking a poorly placed bottle of Mobsession for Men ™.
Our conversation is interrupted by an old friend of mine. A lovely chap, he’s fully welcome, but it does take a moment for us to snap out of serious and land in drunkenly whimsical and chatty. He’s gregarious as ever. He is the teacher of these students. He has not skipped the festive 1.5 ouncers that have been afoot.
The gravity at our table takes another, admittedly curious, hit when a 10-inch dildo with a suction-cup bottom is slapped onto the end of it and careens back and forth in a proud and faintly reminiscent manner. A girl with dreadlocks introduces herself. She has so many hickeys that her neck is a political map of Central Europe. Her eyes don’t so much focus as they count the number of us sitting at the table. She sits.
The next hour I am embroiled in the description of ‘dildo throw’ an extracurricular sport at their school; possible scholarships or recruitment opportunities were not discussed. The sport has a serious set of rules and guidelines. The dildo is thrown as one would an axe, in a way that would hopefully result in an end-over-end trajectory and it should end up against a wall. No axes mean no eyes are put out. And should you unluckily lose an eye to ‘dildo throw’ well you’d have lost an eye, but you’d have been gifted for the remainder of your two-dimensional life the best conversational ice breaker anyone man has ever known. The size of the dildo – as it were – does not matter. One may heave a wee willy or a dong. The only size rule is attached to the suction cup. It must be small enough to suction to one’s forehead – a point made more kinetically when the girl pointed out that the dildo she had was not regulation and then tried in, uh, vain to stick it to her forehead. No go.
When confronted with a completely unique situation – under which this one is absolutely listed – I strive for understanding and relatability. Or a fast escape. Or, failing both, pizza.
When the groups begin throwing it against the tin adverts on the walls, I – calmly – sprint from the place and, locating no pizza, get home as quickly as possible.
