For those just joining us, I haven’t always been the Row Show. I haven’t always had sexy long hair and acool car, and been able to make women go week at the knees with a smoothly-delivered line. When I was a junior burger, I was pretty awkward and shy, especially around women. Hell, I remember walking along the street in Surfers Paradise when I was younger and having to consciously stop myself from looking at the footpath. But when I was almost 19, I met this really pretty girl.
At Joe’s Garage.
If you don’t know Joe’s, it was this shitbird of a nightclub in Gosford, full of drunks, with filthy toilets, expensive drinks and a punch to the head around every corner. It’s now a shitbird of a club named Pulse, and is still full of drunks, with filthy toilets, expensive drinks and a punch to the head around every corner. But now, there are also those dudes in the shirts that look like nighties.
But enough about that, let’s get back to 2002, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the internet didn’t come on phones, it only existed within the confines of very slow computers. I think I also had one of those little chin beards with no other facial hair, but it’s cool, because that was alright back then. Sure, women weren’t throwing themselves at me, but it had nothing to do with my little chin beard.
So I’m pissed at Joe’s one night, bopping around to Angel by Shaggy and that song about birds by Nelly Furtado, and I met this girl. Really pretty, great body, I even danced in a cage with her like I was some sort of champion homo. Gave her a pash, and I couldn’t believe my luck when she agreed to meet up with me again. I thought it was love, she thought I was just the latest bloke to slip a few fingers up her, usual story. I was still new to everything, so when my birthday rolled around, I invited her to Club Troppo with me.
Yes, so now you know that I’ve always been a romantic.
We rolled up, and it was packed because it was a public holiday. When we danced, it felt like no-one but us were in the room. Shit, it felt like no-one else was in the universe. I got on the piss with the fellas, she got on the piss with whoever the fuck she was with, I tried not to get my carefully-spiked hairdo messed up. Then this lass invited me to meet a friend, who appeared to be both a midget, and a gay. Let’s just call him Gidget.
No, not that one, like this!
Yeah, like that. He kept grabbing my arms and saying that I must work out, calling me a ‘handsome boy’ and basically being gay and small. I was pretty chuffed, thinking some mad poof thought I was the best thing since the invention of anatomically-correct Ron Jeremy dildos. I kept holding onto the girl I was seeing, to prove my masculinity and to keep Gidget from grabbing any other large parts of my anatomy… like my legs.
Or my penis!
In my drunken state I became detached from my lady friend, so I wandered outside to see if she and Gidget were out there. Well, I went outside to see if there girl was there, I couldn’t have cared less if Gidget had fallen down a drain. She wasn’t out there, the handsome Tongan chap on the door wouldn’t let me back in (many ex-girlfriends have had the same thought), so I waited outside for this lovely lady.
An hour later, she wandered out… holding hands with Gidget… fucking GIDGET! She took one look at me and said, “I just cheated on you with him” and they swaggered off into the night. I swaggered off to cry under a palm tree.
So, not only did my girlfriend cheat on me, but it was with a gay midget, who I thought found me attractive, but probably didn’t really. It was a double punch to the guts.
It was bad, and I’m not going to lie about that. Hell, I’m sitting here as a 32-year-old, writing about it. I’ve had my share of people treat me badly, and I guess some people would say I’ve treated them badly, but that made me feel like shit. I was just a kid, dumb and trusting, and I couldn’t understand why someone would do that to me on my birthday. I’ve since discovered that it’s not weird, and people replace people every day, which is a load of dog turds, but it’s what happens.
Our story has a happy ending, though. I recently looked up the girl on the Facebook, and it looks like she’s spent the intervening years keeping Four ‘n’ Twenty in business, because she’s massive. She’s also in a long-term relationship with a bald man who looks like he’s not allowed within 200m of schools.
As for Gidget, I assume he caught the AIDS and carked it. Or maybe he finally did fall down that drown. The sawn-off shithead certainly deserves it!
The Drunk and Jobless World Tour 