Ah, yes. Longest story ever, I fear.
Ok, so I'm 23 and wetter behind the ears than a marinated duck. I meet this girl in a bar and ask her out on a date. I was in a weird stage at that point, I thought it was better to set up dates with girls, rather than try to sleep with them straight off. Ah, the foolishness of youth! Anyway, she was a nurse, she was 28 and she was well into her music. Perfect stuff.
I arranged to meet her in the Dublin Castle in Camden. Now, a few of the musos on this website may well be frequent visitors to this hive of scum and villainy. To cut a long description short, The Dublin Castle is where bands like Madness began their careers. It's dark, dank and smelly and it's the kind of place where people who want to be cool go to see bands who want to be famous. Perfect for a skinny idiot like myself to desperately try and impress an older woman.
So, I turned up in the bar and there she was. She was the rare example of a girl who actually becomes better looking when you're sober. Without the fuzziness of two bottles of red wine holding me back, I could see that she was a very beautiful girl. She had longish brown hair, sharp eyes and the kind of cheekbones that you could sharpen a set of knives on.
I bought drinks and we went to sit on the only table available in the gloom, a long thin table near the jukebox. That first hour was a lesson in dating. If any younger players were watching, as Motty might say, that was something for them to take notice of. I got her to talk about herself and her work, but also about the woman outside the hospital. Her likes, her dislikes, her hopes and her dreams. I gently probed here and there to look for baggage, but all seemed clear. I laughed genuinely at her jokes, she was as entertaining as she was beguiling. By the second drink, I was smitten.
It was at this point that things started to go awry. A surge of people entered the bar and started moving around the room in a manner designed to attract attention. Leading the pack was Rhys Evans, he was flanked by Justine form Elastica and Danny from Supergrass. Somewhere behind them appeared to be Meg Matthews, Giggsy's ex from Hollyoaks and some bloke who I vaguely recognised from MTV2.
You'll remember that I said we had sat at the only empty table? Well, it was quite a big long table and we weren't doing a very good job of filling it. I watched agape as we were swamped by this C-List avalanche.
It wasn't so bad, they were all very polite and there was a bit of chit-chat between their camp and ours. They were there to watch Pearl, Danny Supergrass's missus, who was doing a gig there.
Jolly good, I thought. That means you'll all bugger off in a minute. This was vital, because it was clear that my nurse was utterly star-struck.
A good date, you see, is all about spending an evening in each other's company, sharing stories and jokes and generally not getting sidetracked by outside affairs. Maintaing a steady flow of conversation is fairly difficult when the bloke currently on the cover of the NME is fiddling about with a suspicious looking bit of folded paper under the table and asking who wants to join him the khazi.
Anyway, after joining us for about 30mins, they all got up and shuffled into the back room to watch Pearl perform. Splendid stuff, I thought. We're back on!
I got the conversation back on track and within a few laboured wisecracks, I had her back on the hook. Everything was going so well that my only concern was whether or not I'd tidied my bedroom before I'd left. Was I going to have to hastily kick my porn under the bed before leading the nurse into my boudoir?
I got complacent. It was my fault really, looking back.
A big, fat sweaty man approached the table.
"Alright if I sit down?" he said, chewing rapidly.
I didn't know it at the time, but I now know that our new chubby friend was flying off his tits on a ecstasy pill.
I carried on talking to the nurse.
"You two on a first date?" he asked, still chewing like a man possessed.
"Erm, yeah....yeah we are," I answered nervously.
"Thought so," he said and glugged at his white wine. He stopped for a moment, stared at her, stared at me, took another gulp and said, "You're batting miles above your average, mate."
Marvelous. That was just what I needed. The nurse laughed and put her hand on mine. "I think he's lovely," she said, as if I was a scruffy rabbit that had just bounded into her vegetable patch.
"Name's Doug," he grunted. "I own a nightclub in Soho."
"Really?" gushed Nurse. "Whereabouts?"
And with that, I'd lost her. He waxed lyrical, as only the chemically thrilled can, about his nightclub, the people in there, the celebrities he knew, the drugs he had available to him and then beautifully, he told us that two weeks previously, he'd caught Tom Jones bumming Rod Stewart in his office.
"b******s!" I snorted, speaking out for the first time.
They both looked at me as if I'd pi$$ed on the curtains.
"You know the only difference between a gay man and straight man?" asked Chubby, staring me down.
"Gulp?" I may have murmured.
"One pill."
And they laughed. Oh Lordy, how they laughed. She laughed more at that one nugget of Soho wisdom than she had at anything I'd said. And off they went again, banging on with ever more ludicrous stories about celebrities, while I sat and smoked sulkily. I was 23, I was really good at smoking sulkily.
And then I was saved, briefly, by Joanna Taylor from Hollyoaks who came to ask him for directions. I snatched my chance with both hands, hauling the conversation back with the nurse. This was it, this was my monent, if I could just keep her talking then Chubby would get bored and wander off and I could have proper sex with a nurse, rather than one-handed sex thinking about a nurse.
"You know what?" interupted Chubby.
"What?!" I squeaked in frustration. "What do you want?"
"I'd love to watch you two f%&k."
There was a very long pause. The jukebox stopped. People stopped. Mobiles went dead. A large cloud of silence enveloped the bar.
"But only," he continued, gesturing at me with his cigarette, "only if I could lick your arsehole while you're f%&king her."
People, when I've told this story, have often asked me if I hit him hard, between the eyes, with an ashtray. They've wanted to know if I suddenly broke and swung for him. The truth is, I didn't know what to do. Oddly, the first thought to cross my mind was, 'I want my mum'.
How did it go so wrong? As both nurse and Chubbs burst into floods of giggles, I wondered if perhaps, just perhaps, I should have suggested a first date at the Hogshead down the road.
