Читать книгу The Men Commandments - Christian O’Connell - Страница 45

Back to men and their mates. Men in the company of other men are capable of great feats of ingenuity – like Stonehenge, say. Actually, that might not be the best example. Relocating some big rocks. Beer must have been involved.

Men do like to carry interesting objects home from the pub. It’s one of the rare times we enjoy shopping. Or man’s other great motivator:

‘You heard why we’re humping these great big things?’

‘For gullible hippies and dumb American tourists?’

‘Nope, some idiot wants to get in some girl’s knickers.’

Men with other men are also capable of great feats of stupidity.

The Darwin Awards celebrate those who ‘improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it’. They record for us and future generations some darkly funny accidental deaths, mostly featuring men, with other men, and alcohol.

Tony Roberts, 25, lost his right eye having been shot through the skull by a hunting arrow during an initiation into a men’s rafting club, Mountain Men Anonymous (probably known now as Stupid Mountain Men Anonymous) in Grants Pass, Oregon.

What a deadly combination, men with hunting gear and alcohol. (Might make a good episode of Holby City, though). What happened here, I understand, is a good friend of Tony’s tried to shoot a beer can off his head. It would have had to have been a close friend, of course – couldn’t let a complete stranger do something as intimate as shooting at you with large arrows.

Many clubs and societies have some kind of entrance exam, and Mountain Men Anonymous’s test was having someone shoot an arrow at your head while pissed. It’s natural selection: they only want the very finest minds entering. With or without bits of metal protruding from them.

I bet his first words after being released from hospital were, ‘Did I pass? Am I in Mountain Men Anonymous?’

That is nothing compared to what I think is the definitive story of the danger present when two lethal substances come into contact:

Man + Man x Beer = Idea

Let us examine the tale of Sal Hawkins and John Pernicky, two huge Metallica fans. They showed up to where the band was playing in Washington but they had no tickets so sat in the car park drinking beer, thinking the situation over. Suddenly a genius idea occurred. Inspiration. The mother of invention is necessity, they say, but swap necessity for beer and they had something.

A plan was hatched after they noticed that the perimeter fence was only nine foot high and no possible deterrent to two sharp men like themselves. Problem solvers like all men. They then decided to pull their pick-up truck (we could have guessed they drove one of them) over to the fence.

The plan was that John, the heavier of the two, was to hop over and then help his buddy over. Simple. What could possibly go wrong?

Sadly, the fence had a 30-foot drop on the other side. So when John launched himself over like some nubile gymnast from the former Eastern Bloc, he found himself crashing through a big tree, a large branch stopping his descent by snagging his shorts. Dangling from the tree with one arm broken, John saw some bushes beneath him and, being one of nature’s problem solvers, thought he would simply cut away his shorts with his penknife and then drop to the bushes below him. (Must have seen MacGyver or The A Team do something pretty similar.)

Once free of his shorts, John fell down into what he now realised were holly bushes. They scratched him everywhere and, without the protection of his shorts, one branch entered his rectal cavity. It gets worse. The penknife dropped too and when he landed it went three inches into his thigh. Sal saw his buddy in all this pain and sprung into man action. A problem-solving man in action is a sight to see. He threw his fallen comrade a rope, but as John was a big fella, Sal couldn’t pull him too well. Not to worry, try something else, as you never let a mate down. Especially if the mate is partially naked with a branch up his arse. So he attached the rope to the pick-up truck.

This is where it goes really bad.

Sal, in his drunken state, puts the thing in reverse and crashes through the fence, landing flat on top of his mate. Killing him. Sal is thrown from the vehicle and also dies.

The police arrive. Picture the scene that awaits them. Even CSI’s Gil Grissom would have been confused by this one. A pick-up truck with its driver thrown 100 feet away, and then under the truck a semi-naked man, covered in scratches with a holly branch up his rectum, a knife in his leg, and his shorts in a tree.

Here’s to you, John and Sal, two fine minds and men taken from us. Some sort of commemorative statue would be a fitting tribute to these real men of genius. Bronze, I’m thinking, depicting the final sad scene. Branch up bum, truck on top, the whole deal. Men from all over the world could come and pay tribute. Should be placed on the Washington town hall steps. A Man Lourdes. Kids could be taken there to warn them about the dangers of alcohol and, more importantly, being a man.

I feel you also need to know and respect a Polish farmer called Krystof Azninski who in 1995… er… there’s no easy way to put this, cut his own head off.

Guess what? He had been drinking with male friends. Apparently one of the gathered geniuses (or is the plural genii?) casually suggested they strip naked and play some ‘men’s games’.

What was I saying about men together? It’s all fun and games until someone loses a head.

And we wonder why women think we behave like dicks when we are together. Never seen the Sex and the City girls behaving like that? Might watch it if they did.

Back to the naked men and the ‘men’s games’. They start off with a good old round of hitting each other over the head with frozen turnips. No, really. Frozen turnips. Then, as is usually the case, one of the men ups the stakes by getting a chainsaw and CUTTING HIS OWN FOOT OFF.

Now, we weren’t there but you don’t have to wonder at what happened next. Put men together and some form of one-upmanship will occur. It can be the swapping of increasingly tall stories with the final ones being 100 per cent bona fide bullshit; sometimes it’s shots being ordered to ‘get the party started’; sometimes it’s the removal of limbs. Did any of the men say, ‘OK, that’s enough now – we’ve all had a few drinks and smashed frozen turnips over our heads, pretty soon someone’s gonna get hurt’?

No, they didn’t.

Azninski shouted ‘WATCH THIS!’ as he swung the chainsaw at his head, taking it off. His head. Off.

‘It’s funny, when he was young he put on his sister’s underwear. But he died like a man,’ one of those fine men friends said. I think I speak for all of us when I say who would want a more fitting way to be remembered by friends and family?