Life... With No Breaks (A laugh-out-loud comedy memoir)

by Spalding, Nick

  I live in a pokey one bedroom apartment, wash my clothes when I remember to and eat nothing but beans on toast.

  I’m never up early enough to hear the postman, but sometimes I’m out late enough to see him as I stumble home.

  The horror of things like mortgages, taxes and interest free loans are but distant ships on the horizon of life.

  Probably the most important decision in my life right now is whether to drink beer or spirits.

  Naturally, I’m loving every minute of it.

  I’m in that wonderful period between being a kid and a real adult, where I run my life the way I want - largely at the expense of the British government. This was a time when they still thought it probably wasn’t a good idea to saddle the workers of tomorrow with more debt than a small African country.

  What I really want right now is the blonde I keep seeing in the student bar every weekend.

  She normally stands near the pool table - the one with the unidentifiable stain on it that bares a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln - holding half a lager and chatting with her friends.

  Her name is Callie.

  I have no idea what this is short for, but it sounds enchanting to my ears regardless. I think she looks a little bit like Grace Kelly. But with bigger tits.

  I have very little information about her, except she’s a year above me on the same degree course. I’ve also been informed by a friend that she once did a striptease in the student common room at Christmas, but as this friend also maintains his brother - who works in a fish and chip shop - once felt up Naomi Campbell at a cocktail party in London, I’m taking this information with a gigantic pinch of salt.

  Not being much of a ladies man, it’s taken me several weeks to even think about plucking up the courage to speak to Callie.

  And here she is.

  At the same party as me.

  Gods be praised and we all sing hallelujah!

  This makes things much easier. The daunting environment of the student bar has been replaced by the comfortable atmosphere of my friend Steve’s house… well, he’s more a nodding acquaintance than a friend - it’s one of those friend of a friend invites we all know and love.

  Parties lend themselves more to relaxed conversation and I’m pretty sure I can spark one up with Callie without sounding like a hormonal sixteen year old.

  It’s the perfect opportunity.

  The stage is set and the show must go on.

  Sadly, I’m drunk.

  Very, very drunk.

  I’ve been drinking since roughly three o’clock that afternoon, in the time honoured tradition of loafing under-graduates everywhere and it’s deep into evening by the time I realise Callie the Wonder Girl is in my general vicinity.

  But never mind. Alcohol instils confidence!

  It should be absolutely no problem to venture up to the young lady and charm the pants off her.

  I have no doubt that sex of an epic nature is not too far off in the grand scheme of things - providing I can get past that annoying introductory phase we have to negotiate before carnal gymnastics can ensue.

  Some back story before we continue, I think:

  I was not at this time what you could call sexually experienced. My career as a lover amounted to two women and my right hand.

  Neither was I experienced in the ways of alcohol consumption - something that would prove an important factor in the scene about to unfold.

  An experienced drinker can be very drunk, but still have the where-with-all to hide his level of intoxication and perform as a functioning adult.

  I wasn’t experienced and therefore had no chance.

  At about ten o’ clock I realise Callie is at the party and what’s more, she doesn’t appear to be accompanied by a boyfriend.

  There’s a few guys gathered around her, like bees around the proverbial honey pot, but the alcohol is assuring me they’ll be swept away once Spalding The Great enters the fray.

  Bearing this in mind, I’ve worked out an opening gambit:

  ‘Hi. It’s Callie, right? You’re in the third year of my course. Can you give me a heads up what we’re doing next semester?’

  Brilliant, eh?

  Cool, easy-going and smooth.

  Also shows a dedication to my studies, which makes me look like an intelligent guy. One who will help her produce strong and charismatic offspring.

  Sadly, I never get the chance to use it.

  Concentration is not one of the inexperienced drinking man’s strong points, especially when he’s passed the ten-pint mark.

  Every time I think about using my wonderful ice breaker, my attention is diverted away like a magpie seeing something shiny at the side of the road. It’s either the promise of more alcohol, or a favourite song on the stereo that takes me away from the girl of my dreams.

  Time slips by.

  Ten o’clock rapidly sinks into eleven… and crawls towards midnight.

  I’m not drunk by this time.

  Oh, no, no, no.

  I am shitfaced.

  Referring back to what I said about alcoholic experience and control over oneself, I didn’t just mean control over the mind and emotions - I meant control over the body as well.

  After ten pints, the section of your brain that spends its days making sure your bodily functions operate efficiently has buggered off for a nice soothing head massage, leaving you to fend for yourself.

  The drunken man isn’t good at fighting the effect alcohol has on his complicated organic processes and tends to surrender quicker than a Frenchman in 1940.

  Unpleasant things happen next.

  I see the expression you’re making now. You know what’s coming, right? You think you’ve got things figured out!

  You’re thinking your new pal Nick strolled up and was sick all over poor old Callie, aren’t you?

  If only.

  I didn’t vomit over her. It was much worse than that.

  While I’m in the kitchen telling a bad joke - her only a few feet away in the lounge and oblivious to my planned seduction - I slip drunkenly on a patch of beer-soaked linoleum, head butting a kitchen cabinet. My knees buckle from under me, my arse hits the ground hard… and my bowels loosen to the point of no return.

  In short - and to put no finer point on it - I shit myself.

  My arse hits the floor and the shock makes my teeth rattle. I feel an unpleasant pancake of warmth spreading across my buttocks and the odour of defeat rises from my nether regions.

  Even in my drunken state, I know this isn’t going to end well.

  The first person to react is my mate Sam, who’s standing next to me. His cry of disgust is followed by a very loud exclamation that didn’t help my humiliation one bit:

  ‘Bloody hell! Spalding’s crapped his pants!’

  Yes indeed, Spalding had crapped his pants.

  Something that hadn’t happened to Spalding since about the age of two.

  Spalding also had a nice bleeding scalp from the head-to-cabinet interface, but that paled into insignificance alongside the whole defecating in public side of things.

  Rapidly, those in attendance notice what has befallen me and are starting to arrive at their own conclusions based on Sam’s announcement and my location on the floor.

  I sit there for a few seconds, letting my inebriated brain digest recent events and trying to sort out an exit strategy from the party.

  All thoughts of wooing Callie have flown.

  A method of painless suicide is formulating, to avoid the endless embarrassment this night would otherwise cause. I’m nothing if not a forward thinker.

  I rise gingerly to my feet, my left hand grasping my backside in a vain effort to prevent the contents of my underwear slipping down my leg.

  As my face turns red and my head swims like a pro on steroids, I shuffle past the aghast party-goers and into the lounge beyond.

  Yep, there she is. Callie the Wonder Girl - hand over her mouth in horror and eyes as wide as dinner plates.
<
br />   I offer her a grin.

  I don’t know what I’m hoping to accomplish with this but it’s worth a shot.

  I guess I'm trying to convey my feelings about the whole situation in that smile:

  ‘Hey, never mind, eh? These things happen. We’ll look back and laugh about it in ten years when we’re married and have three kids.’

  Except these things didn’t just happen… at least not to twenty-two year old undergraduates.

  She knows it - I could tell by the way she was backing away from me - and I know it.

  …time to beat a hasty retreat.

  I do so - not with the sound of ringing laughter, but with a horrified silence only broken by the loud stereo.

  As I recall, the song playing was Help by The Beatles.

  Fitting.

  It takes me a few moments to get to the front door. I know as I scrabble for purchase on the lock with one hand - buttocks clasped in the other - that there's a hoard of students looking down the hallway at me, wondering if the entertainment is ever going to end.

  I wrench the front door open and shamble off into the night, running like a sailor with rickets.

  Thankfully, I only live a couple of streets away.

  It occurs to me that I should probably stop and remove my soiled clothing, but I decide not to, opting for a crap covered arse rather than a night in the cells for indecent exposure.

  On most nights, there would be virtually no-one on the streets to see me. Tonight though, it seems the world and his wife have decided on a nice moonlit stroll and I have to swerve around several people before arriving back at the flat.

  God knows what they made of this partially blood-soaked maniac, running in a bow-legged jog, clutching his rear-end like he’s scared it’s going to explode.

  I seem to remember mumbling swift apologies by way of explanation, as if they'd known what had happened.

  When something truly awful happens to you, it’s funny how you believe the rest of the world cares.

  In my mind, there are headlines forming for tomorrow’s papers:

  PARTY POO-PER SPALDING IN PANT-FILLING PRATFALL!

  Pictures on pages 7, 8, 9 & 11!!

  I arrive at my flat and run straight upstairs to the bathroom to clean off. This takes quite a while as I’m still as drunk as a skunk.

  When the cleaning is over - including some rather painful prodding at the cut on my head with a TCP soaked jay cloth - and I’ve changed into a pair of clean jogging pants, I sit back on the toilet, stare into space and wonder what the hell to do.

  I’m sitting there pondering the possibilities of emigrating to a country thousands of miles away - where no-one speaks English and alcohol is illegal - when my stomach decides it wants in on the action and decides to throw up what hadn’t already come out the other end.

  Thankfully, no-one’s around to see this.

  In the next few days and weeks, word got round about my exploits.

  I couldn’t walk through the university campus without thinking people were staring at me and then going to tell their friends that they’d just spotted ‘Follow Through Spalding’ walking past the library.

  I felt it the better part of discretion to avoid social gatherings for a while.

  I was expecting lots of barbed witticisms from my friends, but was surprised to find that none of them wanted to mention it.

  This was somehow worse.

  I saw Callie a few times after that night, but tended to drop my eyes and shuffle into the shadows before she had a chance to see me.

  I’d like to think I can recover my dignity in most situations, but recovering any from this episode would make raising the Titanic look as easy as boiling a small kettle.

  I tended to stick to four pints or less from then on.

  …and still do.

  8.27 pm

  4635 Words

  Not the most cerebral of stories to kick us off, but I hope it made you laugh.

  It might have disgusted you a bit too, but I’m sure I saw a smile spread across your face and heard a small chuckle - which goes to show toilet humour is never a bad thing in moderation.

  Let’s hope there’s no-one with you, because they’ll be curious as to why your smiling. Explaining it’s because you've just read a story about a fully grown man crapping his pants in public might be a little hard to accomplish and still sound like a mature human being.

  There’s nothing like a man’s humiliating downfall to get the ball rolling, I say.

  Please stop looking at my backside like that though - as if something horrendous is about to happen. I’m stone cold sober at the moment and my sphincter is behaving itself. I don’t expect it to start playing up again until I'm eighty.

  Worry not, I’m sure I can plumb the depths of my memory and recall more embarrassing episodes to delight you with as the book goes on.

  There are more than enough to choose from. Though I can’t think of any offhand that equal that one for sheer humiliation in the presence of the opposite sex. It amazes me I haven’t spent the last fifteen years in therapy.

  I can look back on it now and laugh at the whole thing. The passage of time lends a certain objectivity and the humiliation has faded to nothing in the intervening fifteen years.

  Almost, anyway.

  I don’t think it matters how old you are or how wise you get in later life, incidents of extreme embarrassment always retain a degree of shame, no matter what station you achieve in life.

  If Albert Einstein had suffered a similar fate, all the Nobel prizes and universally accepted theories of relativity wouldn’t entirely put to rest the shame of soiling oneself in public.

  Of course, the flip side is we remember the great moments as well.

  All the major events in our lives - good or bad - stay with us, while the rest of the garden variety stuff gets washed down the memory drain.

  I think you’re more likely recall the bad moments however. It’s just the way the mind works:

  You may have climbed a mountain wearing only a thong...

  You may have cured Beriberi disease with nothing more than a spatula, Petri dish and good intentions...

  You may have saved twenty bawling children from certain death in a cable car accident...

  You may have done all these things, but I bet the memories that jump from your subconscious more often than not are the ones you wish you could forget:

  Got caught masturbating by your mother when you were thirteen? Bang! It's in your head as your new lover’s hand slides down to your crotch.

  Thrown in the cells for a night after stealing ten traffic cones when you were eighteen? Wallop! There it is as the boss at your new dream job tells you they have to run a background check before you can start.

  Had a haircut done by your best friend that made you look like an escapee from the local home for the mentally distressed? Boom! There it is as you sit down in Coiffure Jacques for that hundred pound cut you’ve been saving up for over the last six weeks.

  Been dancing away merrily to Rihanna in a nightclub, blissfully unaware your skirt has slid down your legs and that all the girls from work are pointing and laughing? Whack! There it is as you take to the dance floor for a ceremonial twirl at the wedding reception with your new husband.

  We all have them tucked at the back of our minds, in a special locker marked World, Swallow Me Up - ready to pop up at a moment’s notice and when you least suspect it.

  I think this explains why we find solace in the trials and tribulations of others.

  Misery loves company after all and there’s nothing like sharing your woes and past cock-ups with someone else to make you feel better.

  Perhaps that’s what I’m doing with my little project here, if I can get philosophical about it for a moment. I'm writing some kind of half-arsed confessional to you, my brand new friend.

  I’m not much of a philosopher usually.

  It’s probably better to let most stuff just wash over you, picking out the bits from the fl
otsam and jetsam that look important. Over-thinking things leads to tension headaches and an ulcer.

  Everyone has to prioritise the important from the trivial. To decide what’s likely to have a big impact on your life from what won’t.

  …the tree coming towards you at forty miles an hour for instance - that’s probably quite important.

  It’d be lovely to hear about something you’d like to forget. I’m as happy to listen to other people’s anecdotes as I am recounting tales of my own.

  Can’t do that with you, can I?

  Strictly one-way traffic in this conversation, I’m afraid.

  I’m the writer and you’re the reader.

  How about this then: as you can’t tell me, why not grab the nearest person you know and reveal something you’d have otherwise kept to yourself?

  Go on, give it a go. It’s very liberating, I assure you.

  It doesn’t matter if it’s not as gigantically horrible as my incident at the party.

  Maybe you recently farted at an inopportune moment, or blurted out something you probably shouldn’t have.

  I did that once.

  I called a senior female work colleague of mine mum during a meeting.

  We’re not talking the levels of embarrassment I achieved with my little accident, but it certainly made my face red. Hers too, for that matter.

  Off you go, then.

  Go confess a minor sin or indiscretion to a loved one. I’ll sit here and wait for you to come back.

  ...

  …

  Back?

  Feel better?

  Excellent.

  Sit back in the spare chair - I’ve added a nice soft cushion.

  The cookies are starting to run a bit low now - who’s a greedy little sod, then? - but I’ve got some microwave popcorn, if you fancy.

  I haven’t opened the Pringles yet, so you can have the satisfaction of hearing that little floomp noise the tube makes when you rip off the seal.

  Ok, back to the plot - or lack of it in this case.