Dry mouth! You know it is going to happen, yet, when you reach for the glass of water, you realize, the glass is still in the cupboard and the water is yet to be released from the tap. I woke up to find that my saliva had left me and oozed onto my pillow, like an oil slick and I was the bird you see on the news, stuck, helpless in the gooey mess that remained. I could taste something. The drought that ensued left a tang on my beached whale like tongue. Curry….. Perhaps? While lying on my stomach I felt something underneath me pressing against my skin, just above my bellybutton. It had the same characteristics as a large, stale chip but could just have easily been a similar sized finger. I didn’t want to see what it was either way! Anyway, I couldn’t look. A hard, dark green substance sat deep into the corner of my eyes clinging to my eye lids preventing me from visually checking what lay beneath. After weighing up my options I chose my index finger over my baby finger to scrape away the crusty build up as I felt, ‘old Pinky’ just wasn’t up to the demanding task! Waking up on Sunday mornings after copious amounts of Captain Blackout, or Captain Morgan as it is known to the lay pirate, thinking ‘What am I after doing?’ was something I was all too used to, but there was more of an uneasy feeling in the air that morning.
I slowly made my way to my feet and hazily took in my surroundings. I gradually became aware that this was not my room, nor was it my house, but it was however, a chip that was on my belly! The chip mystery required a little detective work to find out how it got there, but there was a bigger question on my mind, how did I get there? As I looked around the room I tried to find as many clues as I could to help me understand where I was. There was a pair of small, light blue shorts hanging over the radiator, and above it, on a shelf; there was a photo frame with a picture inside of a pretty blonde lady sitting on a swing. I did not recognise her. For no other reason known to me, other than I had seen it in movies, I picked up the shorts, brought them to my nose and like you would with an expensive glass of wine, with no second thoughts, dove in, and inhaled. Never in a million years did I expect it to smell that way. The shorts and the lady in the photo frame were in no way connected, unless they were the rotting sportswear of her recently exhumed body! Breathing is not something I’ve taken for granted. I cherish every gasp of air my lungs taste but the foul, atrocious, fumes of ass and death that were creeping down my oesophagus made me wish that I could temporarily shut down my respiratory system.
From the ever increasing light coming through the flimsy net curtains and from the unattractive whistling of a few tone deaf birds, I guessed it was just after dawn. However, not knowing what time dawn was, I did not have a clue what time it was. Afraid to venture out the door which was left slightly ajar, I began to retrace my steps from my memories of Saturday and whatever I could remember, up to, just before the shorts sniffing incident! Five o clock, roughly, the day before, I was driving down through town with the radio on whatever evening chat show was on and I thought to myself ‘Are Irish people only happy when they are complaining about something they can never change?!’. This had been on my mind as I had just been to get petrol and there was a six man conversation taking place in the forecourt of the supermarket. One of the men said in the jolliest of tones, ‘sure if they didn’t get us with petrol, they would get us with alcohol!’ To which another man replied ‘you are right there Tom, soon we won’t be able to drink or drive, never mind do them both at once!’ A freakishly tall man then added ‘I remember back in the day when’. It was at this point I zoned out, only to hear them all laughing a few seconds later at what I can only assume was the giant’s hilarious reminiscing.
As my memory went on, I then pulled into the car park to leave my car there for the night before going to the pub and I noticed two teenagers receiving a mouthful of abuse from a fat drunk who seemed to be getting progressively crazy. I asked the kids what the problem was and if I could help and they told me that the man they had now nicknamed ‘Porky’ had just started shouting at them out of the blue. They then said that after one of them jokingly pleaded with Porky (to be fair to them, he did look like someone who should be named Porky) not to eat them, this extra large, round man, began crying. Armed with a bag of cans and a loaf of bread, Porky, I mean, the fat man turned his attentions towards me. He seemed to want a fight but knowing that even the biggest of men was a baby one time, I gently calmed him down by singing ‘The Wheels on the bus’. Maybe it wasn’t so much calm that came over him, more like a mild confusion, but either way it worked as he gave up shouting and crying and returned to his lair.
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