by Dom Harvey
The problem was sorted but I still felt like I had to race back to where I needed to be, to do some sort of damage control and hopefully salvage my career.
As I sorted my items from the messy mountain of clothes on the floor I looked over to my mate.
‘Stables, get dressed, bro. We have to get back.’
‘Hang on, mate. I’m not ready yet.’
I couldn’t believe it. I was having heart palpitations from the panic and he wanted to finish up! Fair enough, I suppose. He had arranged this big night out and was generous enough to invite me along as his wingman and I was not even courteous enough to let the guy have a moment to finish. In the end I relented, sort of.
‘I’m going to wait in the van. Please be quick.’
My new lady friend walked me to the door with a bathrobe on.
I suggested we should meet up again sometime for a sequel. She indicated it would be highly unlikely that would happen again in this lifetime.
I got in the driver’s seat and started the engine. After a few minutes, long enough for the van heater to warm up and for me to blast the horn a couple of times, Stables jumped in holding his pile of clothes.
We raced back at speeds no human being should ever travel in a van, let alone a van emblazoned with radio station logos.
Stables put his clothes back on and chain-smoked for a while with the window down a couple of inches before he broke the silence. ‘Mate, I don’t know why you’re in such a rush to get back. If you’re in the shit, you’re going to be in the shit whether we’re in Palmy or Otaki. We were having a good time there!’
He was right. I was totally envious of his blasé attitude to just about everything. He rolled through life with the attitude that most of the stuff that you worry about never even ends up occurring. This mindset has got him in trouble over the years. But it also allowed him to get away with a lot. And on this particular occasion, as my mate had predicted, nothing did happen.
Steve Rowe did not hear Brian’s frantic call-out for help.
And Brian was nice enough not to tell on me. His silence cost me a box of Lion Reds, which was a very small price to pay given the trouble I would have been in if he decided to tell anyone.
And, to this day, that is my entire experience with this group sex business—brief, incredibly stressful, not a story I like to reminisce about and certainly nothing worth boasting about.
Those among us who are sticklers for detail may argue that two couples having sex at the same time in the same room doesn’t count as a legitimate foursome. As one of my mates said, ‘That’s a bullshit foursome! All you did was synchronised shagging.’
DO IT ON A PLANE
As far as fantasies go, I reckon this would have to be one of the most talked about but least often actually achieved. The high chance of getting caught probably puts the more sensible half of any couple off trying it out.
But realistically, if you joined the club and then got caught, what’s the worst that’s going to happen? It’s not like the pilot is going to turn the plane around because a couple in economy class were having a claustrophobic shag in the loo. That could make for a very funny in-flight announcement by the pilot, though.
As far as repercussions go for couples who do happen to get caught out, my guess would be that it would all depend on the mood and attitude of the airline staff member who catches you. If they’re a good sort, they may give you a wink and sly grin and remind you it’s against airline policy. If the staff working on your flight aren’t quite so good-natured, the trolley dolly may give you a filthy look and then refuse to let you listen to your iPod or have your tray table down for the final bit of the flight. Oh wait, they don’t let you do that anyway.
I’ve thought about this a lot. In fact, most times I fly it is something that crosses my mind. Which makes me a sick puppy, granted, but also makes me very qualified to share with you the various ways this coveted status can be gained.
There may very well be other ways. But these to me seem like the ways that will draw the least attention to yourself or your partner on the way to mile-high glory.
1. A cheeky his-and-hers hand shandy under the complimentary blanket once the cabin lights have been dimmed. For obvious reasons it is crucial that the third seat is empty, especially if the third seat is the middle one in between you and your partner. Also, to avoid drawing unwanted attention with ‘the bobbing blanket’, a spare hand or the thighs and knees must be used to form a type of tent framework underneath. The hand shandy will be invigorating but some of the more pedantic among us may say that it is not enough to get you membership into the coveted club.
2. Lying down on a row of those Air NZ ‘cuddle class’ seats. Easy and discreet. Thrusting and noise must be kept to a minimum. And senses must be on high alert for witnesses.
3. One of those lie-flat beds in business class. These seats even give you a half-wall of privacy from other passengers. As with the cuddle class option, thrusting and noise must be avoided. Imagine you are having sex in a tent with your kids sleeping nearby.
4. The toilets. This is the location on the plane that will offer the most privacy. It is also the location where you are most likely to get busted. Chances are there will be another passenger waiting to go in when that door swings open, so be prepared to unlock it and briskly depart with your head down! (And that is if you are lucky enough to get in without being spotted and reported by a prudish or envious passenger.) These toilets offer barely enough room for one person to have a comfortable bowel movement so from a practical perspective I cannot imagine it would be the most enjoyable intercourse a couple will experience, but what is a little bit of discomfort for a story to gross the grandkids out with?
As I said, there may be other ways to join the club, but these four appear to be the easiest. With each of these, a long night flight will be the best option. One of those flights where you get a meal, then the cabin lights get dimmed as the passengers are encouraged to sleep.
My strategy for ticking this item off my bucket list? Option 4, the toilet on an Air NZ night flight from Brisbane to Auckland. My wife is quite conservative but she is also a very cheap drunk and I planned to shamelessly use her alcohol intolerance to my advantage.
Our flight was scheduled to board at 4.45 pm.
With all international travel you are required to check in two hours before your flight. Unbeknown to my wife, I planned to spend those two hours romancing her in a way that can only be done at an airport, sort of like departure lounge foreplay.
When the taxi pulled up I paid the fare, then fetched the trolley and loaded our bags on. Next I pretended to be interested in the smell of the perfumes in the duty-free shop. ‘Mmmm, that smells good. That fragrance definitely suits you. You should buy some of this Britney Spears perfume, babe.’ I think I said all the right things. And departure cards? As much as I hate these things, I filled them in too.
Then in the bookshop I found a Marian Keyes paperback and asked her if she had this title already. Her answer was irrelevant. What mattered was that I was seen to be taking an interest. This was like an episode of that reality TV show Survivor and I was the villain who everybody thought was the good guy. I was going to outwit, outplay and outlast in order to get me some high altitude lavatory love.
Then we took our stools at the bar in the departure lounge and ate elderly sandwiches and drank overpriced alcohol as we waited for the boarding call. This would have to be a fine balancing act—two to three standard drinks and my chances of talking her into doing something she would never usually do would be greatly enhanced. Anything more than three drinks and she would probably be deemed too drunk to board the plane.
Bing-bong, the public address system came to life and everybody stopped what they were doing in case the announcement we were about to hear was of concern to them. As soon as they realised the announcement did not affect them personally, most went back to their conversations immediately and at that moment I wondered how many other men were in the pr
ocess of laying down the groundwork for membership into one of the world’s most exclusive clubs. Probably not many. But I guarantee most would have thought about it at one time or another.
‘This is further and final boarding call for all passengers travelling to Auckland on Air New Zealand flight NZ 734,’ the announcement continued. ‘Please have your passport open and boarding pass ready as you make your way to gate 80.’
We sculled back our drinks, picked up our things and made our way to the gate, where we boarded the plane, an Airbus A320. One of the smaller planes designed for short-haul international flights, this one carried 168 passengers and had only three toilets on board: one right at the front right next to the ‘crew only’ door through which the pilots access the cockpit and two at the back. We were seated in aisle 5, so it would be a lengthy walk of shame to get to the two loos at the back. As for the lone toilet at the front of the plane, it would simply be impossible for a couple to enter or exit that cubicle without being noticed by the prying eyes of other passengers.
I suggested we both watch a movie called Love and Other Drugs, starring Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal. I had seen it before and it is a pretty shitty film. But it does feature two human beings who are better looking than most showing a lot of skin. So, combine that with a couple of alcohol beverages consumed at an altitude of 10,000 metres somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, and it could not do my cause anything but good.
Everything went according to plan. The movie, the meal service—‘chuckun or byeff ’—and another couple of alcoholic beverages. Once the meal trays had been taken away the flight still had more than an hour to go. My time to earn my mile-high wings had arrived. I got the Air NZ serviette saved from my meal and wrote on it:
Meet me at the toilet. Walk to the back of plane in 2 minutes and I’ll be in the one on your left. Knock. x
I dropped the note on my wife’s lap just after a very steamy sex scene in the movie. Then got up and made my way to the loos. The note was part of my strategy. I could have tapped her on the arm and talked to her but I thought a note made it all seem a little bit more exciting. Bear in mind, this is definitely not anything we had discussed or prearranged!
Both cubicles were vacant and none of the flight crew were hovering at that end of the plane. It was perfect. I locked the door and waited . . . and waited . . . and waited. After probably seven minutes I opened the door and looked out—she was nowhere to be seen. I went back to my seat. That’s when I found out why I’d been stood up—Jay-Jay was sound asleep! One miniature bottle of sauvignon blanc too many.
By now she even had a slight drunk snore on. My note was still on her lap, exactly where I had left it. I carefully retrieved it, like I was playing a game of pick-up sticks, and never ever told her about my cunning plan. All my meticulous preparation had gone to waste.
It’s funny how these things pan out, though. I got to cross this item off my bucket list a few weeks later. This time it was a completely spontaneous and opportunistic thing. It was in a beautiful old plane too—a DC3 built in the United States during the Second World War. This plane had 56,000 flying hours behind it with airlines including Qantas, Fiji Airways and Mount Cook Airlines.
We were in Taupo getting some McDonald’s. After we got our order the wife suggested we eat it in the old aeroplane which has been converted into an extra seating area. As good luck would have it, we were all alone. We had the entire plane to ourselves.
I’ll spare you all the details but let me just say that even though I ordered a Big Mac combo, this definitely wound up being a happy meal.
I am not a member of the mile-high club. But, I have done it on a plane.
RUN THE PAINTBALL GAUNTLET
The paintball gauntlet is a favourite activity for stag parties. What happens is the guy who is getting married runs, unarmed, the length of the paintball course, while his so-called best friends all try to shoot him. They are only small balls of paint but they hurt like hell and the welts and bruises can last for a good couple of weeks.
Fortunately, I managed to avoid playing a game of paintball when I got married. I have only played the sport once in my life and that was enough to know I hated it. A notice went up on the corkboard in the radio station kitchen with a highlighted bit—the exciting news that we could all play for free. It was some new paintball place that was starting up so they were hoping to get some free plugs on the radio by treating the staff to a complimentary game.
The referee gave us all a briefing, then explained the rules, which I paid very little attention to. There was some flag in some tower somewhere on the course but all I really wanted was to shoot up some shit. I was going to be like Rambo and pretty much every other central character in a movie involving a shootout, so I would get to hurt others while everyone else miraculously missed me. Unfortunately, I found out shortly after the air horn went off to start the game that this was quite different to a Sylvester Stallone video.
I found myself a nice well-protected spot behind a 44-gallon drum, then started spraying paintballs all over the place. I don’t even know if I actually hit anyone, but if I did, I definitely did not get the sort of satisfaction out of it that I anticipated I would.
Then, after maybe two to three minutes of play, I got hit! Hurt like a bitch too! The ball of paint got me right in the centre of my forehead, just above the eyebrows. I was wearing goggles and headgear but the arsehole coworker who shot me somehow managed to find the little gap in between those two protective items. Instinctively I let out a massive groan. That’s when the guy who hit me burst out laughing. For reasons I can only put down to a momentary lapse of reason, I flew into a pain-fuelled rage, dropped my gun and ran over to the colleague who found this all so amusing. After tackling him I sat on him and made him say sorry.
Through his laughter he did apologise but I did have my doubts about the sincerity of the apology, especially when he called me Abdul. I assume he thought the red welt that was forming nicely on my forehead made me look a bit like an Indian.
After that incident I was expelled from the game, which was actually quite a relief because I had no desire to continue anyway, not after that brush with death.
Actually, I had no desire to ever play again in my life.
This is precisely why I decided I should face this demon, get back out there, and experience the famous running of the gauntlet first hand. The time to go back and face my paintball demons after a self-imposed twenty-year ban had arrived.
Where: Lock N Load paintball (near Auckland airport)
Date: Friday 20 January 2012
Time: 0800 hours
Shooters: 40 Edge radio station listeners
The call had been put out on the radio early in the week to find participants to shoot me. The paintball park we chose was Lock N Load, by the Auckland airport. They were happy to host me and provide weapons and paintballs for up to forty shooters. Foolishly, I imagined we might get between five and ten shooters. Three reasons for this guesstimate:
1. Eight on a Friday morning is a bit of an inconvenient time for most.
2. Getting there would require battling insane traffic unless you lived nearby.
And this is the big one . . .
3. Why would anybody want to hurt me?
Boy, was I wrong. I arrived to quite the welcoming committee. All forty guns had been claimed. There were even shooters on stand-by. Who were these monsters?
Evidently most of them were aggrieved radio listeners who had been offended at some point by something I had said. I do have a tendency to say a lot of stuff without thinking it through—you have to when you do twenty hours of live radio each week. Combine this with the fact that I am not very bright and do like to offer my opinion on matters I have very little knowledge of, and suddenly you have a recipe for getting people wound up. Some of the shooters even took the time to tell me their motivation for being there.
‘You once said that girls called Traci, spelt with an i, are easy. That’s how my name is spe
lt and I am most definitely not a slut.’
‘You once said Chad Kroeger from Nickelback looks like the Paddle Pop Lion. They are my favourite band. Insult them and you insult me.’
‘I drive a Rav4. I’m here because you once said that any guy who drives a Rav4 and claims to be straight must be in denial about his sexuality.’
‘Remember the time you said security guards were people who want to be cops but had their application turned down because they’re a bit odd? Well I’m a security guard and I have been waiting for this day for a long time.’
‘Remember when you said any girl with a dolphin tattoo will sleep with a guy in three dates or less? Well, I have a dolphin swimming over my bellybutton and I was a virgin till I got married.’
There were other reasons, too, which I can no longer remember. I was so anxious about what was about to happen to me that I had no time to indulge these listeners with their little grievances. Plus, I dispute some of these complaints. If you don’t think Chad Kroeger looks like the Paddle Pop Lion you need your eyesight checked.
The gauntlet run was going to take place on a course set out like an old western town—like a film set with buildings that had fronts but nothing behind them. The plan was to start at the saloon building and run down the gravel path to the little chapel at the end, probably fifty metres away. Then, after catching my breath in the chapel, I would make the return journey. While I was doing this dash the forty shooters would all be positioned along the fence about twelve metres away from me.
