Call me an alarmist, over-protective broken record but if you’ve had one too many ales at the sushi train or scoffed a bottle of Johnny down The Rock then tottered to yer Dream or that hornet-waisted shag magnet burbling out back, odds are something unpleasant’s going to hit the fan. Make it past the door trogs without being shanked and before you’re even out the bike park you may drive into some delinquent off-duty boy in beige, all tiny finger waggy and equally impaired but, crucially, packing. He may stir your shit until there’s a claret carpet underfoot and the ladyboys are posting your demise on Khmer Hotnews. All over red rover and thank your mother for the rabbits.
If you don’t expire in the carpark, or fall asleep while negotiating Independence Monument – you go around, remember, not up and over – you may well encounter a gang of machete-wielding “playboys” hooning around on those farty-blart KTMs and scaring the crap out of timid old ducks like me minding my own biz in a tuk tuk on my way back from a two pot sherry knees up. They may snatch your purse or your man bag. They may grab the phone right out of your helmet. I guess I should be thankful at least you’re wearing one.
Unlike too many Nutella baguettes, which just make you feel guilty and fat, a skinful of beer can persuade you your closet is the dunny or worse, that your sleeping spouse is. Just yesterday Ricky Gervais off of YouTube told me he’d wee’ed all over Jane one night by accident after a protracted grog fest. I had a serial drunk piddler for a boyfriend once – he saw a man about a dog all over my one good work pantsuit. Another time he tinkled like Seabiscuit on the central heating so for the rest of the winter the whole house stank like the Japanese bridge underpass and I had to sleep under a tarp in the back of our ute. I froze my tits off and admit to a nip or two to keep the rest of my cockles warm. Things went downhill from there relationship-wise, which was probably his plan after all. But still. Smashing my autographed Duran Duran snowdome would have done the trick.
I’m not a blotless seraph in the shitfaced drunk department. I used to drink my weight in screwdrivers. Which made me wear shoulder pads and smoke coloured cocktail cigarettes. I singed all my eyebrows off once in a Pancake Parlour following that exact sequence of events. I’ve also perpetrated some inappropriate weeing – underground carparks a specialty – woken up with my head in a club dunny more than once, and navigated the Stagger of Shame in the white hot 9am CharmingVille glare, gurning and wincing with every brain-pounding step, under the gaze of a dozen snickering tuk tuk drivers. Sometimes it’s good not to know Khmer. There but for the grace of God, they were probably saying. At least when we walk home our skirts aren’t tucked into our pants.
And did you see that thing on the news with the wasted barang asleep in the aisle of a Kiwi Mart? It wasn’t even phone footage – so some little shit must have rung the TV station and got a crew down there ready to roll when the security guard roused that hammered, now unemployed person. Let that be a lesson to us all. Or something. Anyway.
Far be it from me to advocate you go off the grog completely. For the most part people are just a little bit funnier and a little bit hotter after a couple of pinot grigios, and we all need more funny and hot. Plus it’s nice to clink full glasses occasionally with a bunch of likeminded folks I like to call friends.
But given our town’s constant faux holiday vibe and that booze is cheaper than therapy, it’s easy to forget tomorrow is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and not Cinqo de Mayo or National Fish Week. And I wouldn’t even mind the seven-day sozzlement if you would only take a tuk tuk. Because despite the tragic farrago of booze-fuelled madcappery that preceded CharmingVille’s fabled trouser-snake incident of ’04, the sobering road toll, the recent alcohol ad ban, the new helmet rule and the “Bring Sexy Back” government campaign announcement, there are still plenty of us staggering drunks ready to mount and ride. Think twice, wouldja, in this bright ‘n’ shiny new year. Because even though Buddha really was a terrific bloke, I suspect we only live once.