Endless Excerpt

“Do you remember when we dressed up that time?” he asked with a breathless cackle. Of course, it was one of those stories that always popped up when Max and I met.

We were in our late teens. As usual we were emptying the contents of Max’s father, Adam’s over-stocked drinks cabinet.

We would play a kind of sadistic drinking version of blind man’s buff, where we would tie a rag of some sort over the eyes of the other and point them in the direction of the liquor larder. Of course, the all-seeing other would inevitably guide the blind towards the rancid sherry or the coffee liqueur, resulting in a tirade of coughs and expletives. Suddenly Max had remembered that we were meant to be going to a fancy dress party at seven-thirty. Both of us had forgotten, probably because we “hated all that try hard shit”. We dropped the crème de menthe, arriving at the fancy dress shop minutes before it closed. It must have been dress up like a fool season, because we literally had the choice of about ten costumes. We eventually departed with cheap, pathetic costumes that smelled of mothballs and stale sick, barely disguised by a hint of bargain washing powder.

Max was going to be Fred Flintstone and I was Mr. Blobby, both costumes were cumbersome and incredibly hot. Just as we had finished replenishing the drinks cabinet, by filling the bottles with water before Max’s father returned, there was a knock at the door. We decided it would be hilarious to go to the door in full costume, so Fred and Blobby opened the door, only to find a six-foot parrot on the other side of the wood. This obviously pissed on our parade, but as the parrot decapitated itself all was revealed.

“Ah Mr. Quinly,” Max shouted with glee.

“Yabadabadoo!” Peter “Parrot” Quinly replied.

The night progressed with accustomed drunkenness and costume after costume trumping ours, in effort and professionalism. The surprise was that Mr. Blobby was a hit with the girls of our small town. When we eventually slithered towards the corrugated hell of the nightclub, I was a legend. I seemed to have an inordinate amount of phone numbers scrawled on my hand and the same number of tongues forced into my drunken mouth. This made Max envious and mean. He was stumbling and hollering about how Fred Flinstone was “way cooler than Mr. Bloody Blobby.”

Apart from the ridiculous nature of these costumes and how cumbersome they were, nothing compared to the general indignity of trying to urinate whilst wearing them. This is where the trouble really began. The huge pink head of my costume was flipped back, as I opened the Velcro fly to relieve myself. Meanwhile, Max had opened up into another audibly excessive rant concerning the merits of his caveman costume. Now, Max is a generally placid individual, but when he drinks he can and quite frequently becomes a rabid, ranting, raving arsehole. Before I had finished relieving myself, the thick-necked moron standing next to me was visibly annoyed with my friend’s ramblings.

“Look mate, I don’t give a fuck about Fred fucking Flinstone. So shut up,” he said with a lack of finesse that always suggests impending violence.

“You’re just being cavist, you twat” replied my friend. Before I knew it, a fist had whistled past my ear, landing squarely on Fred’s inner nose, knocking him on to his foam backside. I was left standing at the urinal, with my penis flapping in the wind, one hand stopping the fake caveman from being sick over his costume and the other stopping the real caveman from inflicting further damage.

As we chuckled our way through the present day Christmas streets, revelling in drunken nostalgia, Max decided to reveal his life masterplan.