Say Yes to Hepatitis

It began, as these things often do, with a bar tab.
In fact, it started a little before that, with the football.

I don’t particularly care for football – which is why I spent the first night of the NRL Finals in a pub pool competition, blatantly cheating every time my opponent was distracted by an especially exciting display of testosterone-fuelled homoeroticism on the big screen.

The $100 over the bar that I won came very much in handy that evening, when I went out with Fanny, a friend of mine who frequently arrives home from a night out missing one or both of her shoes.

By the time we finished the tab, having heavily augmented it with donations from our own wallets, the evening was on its way downhill, so much so that we decided to get tattoos saying “Why not?”

It was a serious plan and we made the phone call, booked the appointment and were soon on our way to a late-night tattooist.

Luckily, the cool air in the taxi, as well as the thought of hepatitis in some dodgy midnight operation, helped us come to our senses and we decided to go to Oxford Street instead.

We stayed there, drinking in some clubs and getting refused service in others, until about three when we went outside so Fanny could have a smoke. That’s where we met a weedy little guy who looked a bit like a cross between Woody Allen, Screech from “Saved by the Bell” and a hobbit.

He seemed about mid-thirties, though his leathery, hard-drug-user face made it difficult to guess his real age. He was also completely off his face and had just that moment received a lifetime ban from the club we’d walked out of (for reasons that were never made entirely clear to us, now I think of it).
I’m not sure how we fell into conversation with him but it wasn’t long before he mentioned he had some pills at his house around the corner and suddenly we were following him back there. It was obvious that he was lining Fanny and I up for some kind of threesome – with subtle comments like “you never know what kind of crazy sexual things might happen once we get there” – but it was also obvious that we were willing to exploit his over-optimistic hope in order to get some free drugs.
By the time we got to his house our blood was once again starting to cool and we realised we may not be making the smartest move. As this strange, prison-esque arsehole lead us up the stairs towards his bedroom (which smelt like caravan surgery) I clearly remember Fanny whispering (several times); “Oh God, we’re going to die in this house.”
In the bedroom he poured us a petrol/wine each and was keen for us all to relax on the bed. I, on the other hand, was keen for him to produce the cunting pill he’d been talking about… so I told him just that.
He finally got the incredibly blunt hits I was dropping and asked us for $20 each before producing them. That was a let-down from the free gear we were expecting, but I was glad to give him $50 because it let us get the fuck out of there. It was now a commercial transaction and, once it was over, I was free to run all the way back to Oxford Street.
He wasn’t willing to let us go, even when we told him Fanny had left her phone at the club and we had to go back to get it. I used slow hand gestures and assured him we were going to come back, to which he responded that I should go and get the phone… while Fanny stayed behind.
I didn’t need to see the panic-stricken look on her face to know there was no way we were getting separated at this point… there was no polite way to leave so we just started walking out, repeating the obvious lie that we were going to return.

We managed to get out the front easily enough but then the situation suddenly changed when he began demanding that we give him $40 for the pills. We tried to explain that we’d already given him money and even convinced him to fish our $50 out of his pocket to look, but he still didn’t believe us. With anybody else I would have thought he was lying, but one look at his twitching cheeks and mad-cow rolling eyeballs convinced me he seriously thought he had been ripped off.
Only that wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be.

We probably could have walked away at that point but Fanny decided to save trouble and give the guy forty bucks to shut him up. That’s when I got angry and refused to let her. I got all cool about it, thinking I was John Travolta in Pulp Fiction:

“Fanny, if you give that fuckin’ nimrod forty dollars, I’m gonna shoot him on general principles”.

She’s not the most obedient girl, so I snatched her handbag to make sure she couldn’t pay him (it wasn’t until hours later that we realised there wasn’t even any money in it).

Frodo the Angry Pusher shaped up and tried to fight me, but the fact that he wasn’t much taller than my shoulder and could barely stand up gave me the confidence to try staring him down.

I even upped the level of coolness I was trying to exude, acting like I was some kind of professional heavy-weight boxer who has a responsibility not to belt the crap out of belligerent drunks, saying things to Fanny like, “Should I just knock him out? I don’t really want to. What if I hurt him?” It’s a tough line to push with a woman’s
yellow handbag over your shoulder, but I was drunk enough myself to think it might work.

The pill was starting to work, the alcohol had reached its full effect hours previously and I was now feeling like Mars and Zeus’ adopted love child. I charged back and smashed his hand away from her. He stumbled back a few steps, then recovered himself and came charging at me. It was on.
It almost ended there, but then he went a step too far. As Fanny moved to follow me down the road he grabbed hold of her arm, quite forcefully, and wouldn’t let go. That was the final straw.

To say it was a good fight would be a blatant lie. I suffered from my usual fighting handicap, landing only one in every five punches and even then seeming to do no actual damage.

Meanwhile, he didn’t seem to be trying to hit me at all. Instead he clutched a chunk of my hair in each fist in an apparent attempt to lift my scalp off. It would have been quite funny to watch, at least to anybody but Fanny, who was directing irrate taxi-drivers around our flailing bodies. The undoubted highlight would be the moment when he sank his teeth into my chest and the shout went up, more astonished than angry, “You’re BITING me?”
We went to the ground and, after an anxious moment when he almost got a thumb into my eye socket, I ended up straddling his chest in the middle of the road. At that point I was in a clear winning position and would have been happy to walk away but the fucker still wouldn’t let go of my hair.

Ultimately it was a relief when the police arrived and ended the stalemate.

When we got up I was pleased to see how upset and hurt he was, with a bleeding nose and split lip, while I had little more than a badly torn scalp and some bite marks that would almost certainly need a rabies shot. The worst thing was that my best pair of jeans had been torn open when we fell to the road, something I got very little sympathy from the police about.
The interviews were interesting. I tried to act very sober and rational, attempting to convince them that it was just a dispute between mates that got out of hand, while Fanny tried to become their best friend, speaking at motorboat speed in a babble of tumbling high-pitched words that made it clear the adrenaline of the fight had boosted the effect of the ecstasy on her as well. Our case wasn’t helped, though, by the hysterical ravings of the drug dealer, who was nearly in tears as he begged the police to charge me with assault. He kept telling them the fight had started because I owed him $40, only remembering who he was talking to when they asked him what it was for.

It was obviously a drug dispute, even before the cops found the pill he had jettisoned from his pocket when they first showed up. In the end we were lucky to walk away with a $200 summary fine, for public misconduct.

Anyway… Parramatta beat St. George.
Apparently it’s a big deal.

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