2003-07-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

Sesame street was brought to you by the letter Z

By popular request, well two people expressed mild interest, here, in full is a little anecdote through which a certain time and place asserts itself in all its glory. Zippergate.

First let me set the scene. The month was April (the cruelest month, don’t you know) and the year as prince sang it was 1999. We were seven months into a punishing five year bender. The city that this epic fable unfolds against was the legendary western outpost of the twelve tribes, crusties, swans, claddagh rings and buckfast. They call it Galway. It is hard to explain just how deep we had sank into degradation and liver corruption. Each Thursday, following three or four nights drinking, a tweed capped wearing psycho whom I shared a house with, would land in from the off-license with a bottle of Wadski vodka, well that’s what we called it in our regressive brain blasted tongue at the time. Yeah we had our own language, not being capable of communing with the general public, we developed a lingo, low on syllables and mostly pertaining to booze and renegade swans who enjoyed raping ducks. It suited our needs just fine.

On this particular April night, things were looking messy from the outset. The Stone Roses were singing about the resurrection and we were already having trouble reaching the bathroom and it was yet only six or seven o’ clock. The Wadski went down like butter and already the flickering lights of the college bar and the Warwick were singing to us. “Lezzzsgo”. So we fucked off down to the college bar, at least one of us discharging some Wadski into the canal along the way. What a strange and beautiful walk that could be, we were young enough to still be excited about living away from home and were surrounded by booze drenched comrades who stuck together no matter what.

The bar was wedged. Though it was April I can well imagine them playing Christmas songs, I can see a crew of happy red faces and drink sloshing around in pint glasses. We secured our tickets for the warwick, robbed some leftover drinks and queued up for the Salthill-collegebar nightlink shuttle buses, where all those who were in on the best secret in Ireland sang Sawdoctors songs and clapped each other on the back.

The Warwick was more than a nightclub in those days. It was the manifestation of our way of life. Loads of happy drunk people on the longest extended vacation of their lives, most not yet turned twenty. After-bucca, Vodka-shock, and Vambucca. We sank them all. Video killed the radio star. Smells like teen spirit. Basket Case. N17. Creep. I remember events following this with the sort of clarity that either completely defies my drunken state or confirms the extremity of it. I scored, which was not that common an occurrence. Boogying along to Rebel Rebel or some such, I caught the attention of a girl with very good taste. I swear she didn’t look like a pigs corpse dug from the ground following a week of decomposition. Anyway, while tongue twisting with this babe she suddenly pushed me away with an ejaculatory “Ugh”. There was some sort of problem. “Whassh wrong baybee” “You’re wearing one of those retainers, I hate them fuckin things,” “Ok then, fuck off”. I suddenly realized I was in fact wearing minging orthodontic equipment. Folks, it goes downhill from here.

I met the crew at the bar. “That fuckin bitssh doesshn’t like my retainer, what will I do” “Drink more, fuck her” This I did, with gusto and aplomb. It gets blurry here for a while, but next I know I’m stumbling around in the Galway mist drenched night. I’m hardly able to stand, the nightclub has finished and I’m out back leaning up agin a wall attempting to urinate. Zzzzzzzzzziiiiiiiipppp. Oh oh, somethings stuck. Tug tug, it won’t come undone, and there is skin involved Aaaaaaaaaarrrghh. I try to unfasten it, I pull and squeeze and nothing is working. I’m sobering up quickly and ten gallons of scrumpy and Wadski are knocking on the back door. This takes priority, so I find an area of wasteland, and unable to fully remove my trousers due to some particularly gruesome metal-foreskin interaction I let loose a volley of stinking alcohol. I look up from my crouch. I’m surrounded by bouncers, they frog march me to the gate where my friends are waiting. They can see my horribly lopsided gait, but they don’t know yet about the man-injury that is causing it. We stumble home. I show it to the lads, there is chin stroking and ruminations about pliers (something which will come back to haunt me the next day) finally there is ridicule and torment “one, two, buckle my shoe, three, fore, not any more” was about the best they could come up with. Having decided that I was too drunk to go to hospital for fear of getting pumped, I cut the trousers around the zip, put on fresh underclothes and went to bed.

I woke up in a bleary haze, absolutely no recollection of the previous night, until I went to the toilet, and then it all came flooding back, in a tidal wave of morning after guilt, nausea, and all the othe crippling shame that comes with the sort of hardcore drinking that I routinely engaged in. It had started to swell and if their was any chance of unzipping it the previous night, there sure as hell wasn’t now. Instead of going to hospital in Galway (which would have saved me a lot of pain) some sort of homing instinct kicked in and I got the bus to my home town of Kells……………to be continued

2003-07-22T08:45:00.000-07:00

Did you hear about the blind circumciser? He got the sac!

How I unzipped the secrets of the universe (zippergate continued)

A bus departs Galway for Dundalk via Kells every Friday morning. At the best of times I would be ashened face and nauseous sitting on this bus, my poor stomach doing the zannussi tumble dryer, while all around me savages wolf down sausage rolls and all sorts of other shite from Spar, and talk about who they “dogged into” the night before. On this particular day, I was as green, trembling, and clammy as toad roadkill.

Anyway, there I sat in the back seat with one of my friends. My hideous little secret throbbing away. Each bump in the road lead to grimacing and gurns that wouldn’t have been out of place at Gatecrasher or the Hacienda, yet it was no illegal substance causing me to go all rubber faced, it was pain, unimaginable man-pain. You know these feminists who bleat on about there being no equivalence of women’s pain in the life of a man, well I’d like to see if they’d get all Germaine Greer on my ass if they had to take the cock-rockin' fun-bus like me that day.

Eventually I made it to my house. My mother was in the front garden tending to her roses and she saw me come in the gate. How to describe how I appeared to her? Well have you ever seen a freshly circumcised penguin trying to walk? And I had a facial expression that was worth a thousand words. Seven months of boozy oblivion had culminated in my waddling stoop and a glassy look in my eyes that said “Mammy, I’ve let you down, I’m nothing but a Galway mink, I’ve pissed away seven months and now my mickey hurts too”. I had to show it to my parents. My father mentioned pliers again. Despite all the swelling Ciaran junior was shying away from the limelight, he wanted to shrivel away from this nasty environment populated by giant metal mouthed monsters. I could see a look in the oul boy’s eyes that said. “He aint no son of mine”.

I had to try and explain why I didn’t go to hospital in Galway. I couldn’t, there was no logic in my actions. “Were you drinking, when this happened Ciaran” “Well, I’d had a two or three pints of Guinness” Sudden flashback of an empty vodka bottle hitting the ground, two vodka-shocks being gulped in quick succession (an exotic hybrid of vodka and aftershock) “Yeah, I only had three pints” I said.

So, off to Navan hospital with us. I was seated on a trolley in the emergency room waiting for a doctor to see me. A statue of the virgin Mary was seated on the windowsill, snake underfoot. She looked on impenetrably. The curtains were pulled back, some tank of a matron peered in. Five minutes later she returned with a friend, they were pointing, I didn’t need this. Eventually I was attended to by an Asian doctor. He laughed and said there was no need to worry. In a stereotypical voice (not unlike Apu) he assured me “Dees ees very common acceedeent”. As he spoke I noticed something in his right hand. No no no! it was a needle. A big fuck off intravenous needle swinging malevolently towards the family jewels. Local anaesthetic was being administrated where no man should ever feel the pierce of cold steel. After a few seconds of horror a pleasant numbness flowed groinward. Jeez, you could ride all night with this stuff in ya, I thought. “Seet steel, this weel onlee take a meenute” he grinned. Vaseline was applied to the zip. I closed my eyes and thought of the Claddagh swans. In a nano-second the zip was gone, but in the immortal lines of There’s Something About Mary. “We’ve got a bleeder”.

I’m not going to describe the dipping my wick in salty water and extensive antibiotic treatment that was administered for a couple of weeks after. Things worked out alright in the end though, and soon enough the whole incident was just a memory, no visible scarring, nothing. Just a bruised ego, and a line that I hope will never be crossed again. While I still get minginging drunk from time to time, I think I’ve developed a self defense mechanism which now allows me to hang on to just a shred of sanity at the end of the night. No doubt there are many that would disagree with that, but I like to think I emerged from the zip debacle, wiser and more philosophical in matters pertaining to fasteners and toothed catches on clothes. Most of my trousers now have buttons.