Toadzilla Spoons With Paris Hilton

 A group of old friends meet to discuss photos of their schoolyard enemy, Toadzilla, spooning Paris Hilton.

I hadn't seen Max the Tank for five full years, at least since the last day of school exams. Someone said he went to Iraq to teach Saddam Hussein some manners and came back none the wiser. But I knew exactly what he wanted the day he wandered into the shop, a frown as wide as a ripe banana right across his stupid brow.

"You've seen it then?" I said, no need for introductions.

"Amazing!" said the Tank. "I couldn't believe it! What are we going to do?"

"I don't know," I replied, "but Ronnie and Lonnie and Todd want to get together tonight to discuss it. Are you free? And I think Alistair might be there too."

The Tank was aptly named. Five foot tall, as burly as a rubber wellington full of walnuts, his gait resembled a panzer in a mud-bog on the Western Front. Even if you didn't know him, your first impression was always, "My God! That guy looks like a tank!" even down to the way his thin turret of a nose prodded out from his wide, expressionless face.

"Sure," he said. "We've got to get to the bottom of this!"

So we agreed to meet the others at nine down at Yuri's Salsa Zone, an unsuccessful club in Bringles Lane once owned by a man who claimed to be Boris Yeltsin's lovechild. Lonnie and Ronnie drank there all the time. Alistair - popularly called "Me Bucko" - drank there never and Todd the Saliva King - who used to amaze us with his feats of long-distance spitting - would only go there on quiet nights wearing dark sunglasses and a wig. As for me, it was the first time I'd ever bothered.

"What do you mean you don't drink?" Lonnie asked me, incredulous.

"I just don't," I said. "Not my thing."

"Not since he married that Muslim girl," said Alistair, filling them in. "Isn't that right, Me Bucko?"

"So whatever happened to her?" Ronnie wanted to know.

I didn't care to answer.

"Visa fraud," said Alistair. "Six months in the country and she shot through to Queensland with a kebab salesman, never to be seen again. Isn't that the case, Me Bucko?"

Everyone was "Me Bucko" to Alistair who, unaccountably, had picked up a serious pirate fantasy in Year 8 and just never quite grew out of it. And still hadn't, it seemed.

Somehow, even though I hadn't seen him for five full years either, Alistair knew more about my business than I did. I, for instance, thought the alleged "kebab salesman" ran a halal hot-dog stand but Alistair assured me it wasn't so.

"And this means you don't drink?" said Lonnie.

"Right," I said.

"So what'll it be?" asked Todd, standing up to go to the bar.

I ordered a coke - no ice - and remained resolutely free  of the lager bug that had held its grip on the others - Lonnie and Ronnie at least - undiminished since Year 11 summer camp and the stomach-pump debacle at Stinky Reid's twenty-first.

"Suckin' coke for Allah?" asked Lonnie, typical.

"Right," I said again.

"So, anyhoo," broke in the Saliva King, "What do you guys make of these photographs? It can't be for real can it?"

"Stranger things have happened, Me Bucko," said Alistair.

"Name one," said Max.

Silence. No one could quite think of a stranger instance just at that moment, but Alistair maintained that there must have been one. "The world's a bloody weird place, Me Bucko," he insisted. "What about that bloke born with a penis where his nose was supposed to be? Did you see that?"

"That's not true," said Ronnie, sipping his ale.

"It is! I saw it on Youtube."

"Its an urban myth," said Todd.

"And he had two testicles under his chin..." said Alistair continuing, demonstrating how the poor soul looked half-man-half-turkey, but marveling that he had been married for twenty years, worked as a public relations consultant for a major white goods manufacturer, and had seven kids.

"Sure," said Ronnie, skeptical. "And his wife has a mouth that runs vertical instead of horizontal. I've heard that one before!"

"So, anyhoo," broke in the Saliva King again, trying to concentrate, "What about these pictures of Toadzilla?" He was clearly perturbed. He needed his questions answered.

He threw a couple of polaroids onto the table - the same snap-shots that all of us had received in the mail.

There he was - the notorious Toadzilla in gory technicolour apparently spooning - cuddling - carooning next to - none other than Paris Hilton, she half-naked and clearly having fun.

Toadzilla himself was unmistakable. A massive red-haired ball of ugly, with jowls, warts, a huge-lipped mouth-hole just made for catching flies, and two beady black eyes positioned awkwardly on the bulging sides of his bloated head. Six foot three with a slimy complexion and the personality of an unhappy scum-dweller who can't help belching every time he finds his own jokes amusing.

This same creature had been our sworn enemy over six long years of high school - Craig McNamara - Toadzilla, a specimen you'd be only too happy to pity if he wasn't so objectionably oozing with a grotesque self-love and an altogether amphibious disdain for every other.

In the early years - coinciding with puberty, presumably - he would chase unfortunate damsels all around the playground and if he caught them would belch in their face which, he thought, was enormously funny. In later years he'd come to school wearing a tee-shirt depicting two copulating ducks with the slogan 'Fly United!' and, lolling out his tongue like a horny tree-frog, would publicly boast about his obsessions with oral sex. Everyone - especially the entire female gender - found him utterly revolting.

"I think you're just over-compensating for low self-esteem," I told him once, trying to be kind.

He responded by describing the taste of my mother's "lovejuices" and - putting on a phony African-American accident - told me I should "get me some of that!"

"You really are disgusting, aren't you Toadzilla?" I said.

He responded with a triumphant double-barreled  simultaneous belch-and-fart-in-one that he claimed was his "special weapon" for "winning over the ladies."

His most notorious exploit was sexually assaulting our first-year music teacher, Miss Carrol, a tender rooky in a mini-skirt with a studied predilection for Johanne Sebastian Bach.  In the third movement of the Matthew Passion, as she walked up and down the aisles, vainly trying to convince us adolescents that this and not Led Zepplin was the music of the gods, Toadzilla dropped his pencil as she stepped past his desk. She turned around at exactly the moment he bent down to pick it up. He sat up. She jumped. Regrettably, this turn of events resulted in Toadzilla's big boof-head being stuck right up her skirt, his warty frog-mouth pressed directly against the moist spot on her panties. The Matthew Passion reached a crescendo as the luckless Miss Carrol squealed in flayling panic and started thumping Toadzilla on the back in wild, manic, hysterical horror. The more she tried to free herself, though, the more he managed to lift her off her feet appearing, to all of us there that day, to be riding on his head complete with ecstatic wiggles.

"Yummy!" was all he could say when she finally succeeded in getting free. Pale and sickly, she looked at the class aghast. There was a moment's silence. The Matthew Passion ended, a miracle of polyphony. Then the class erupted into spontaneous applause and the unfortunate Miss Carrol ran from the room never to return to teaching again.

"I would have given her the famous Toadzilla tickle," said Toadzilla that lunchtime, flicking his tongue in and out, "But she was on her rags...."

And yet here, five years on, was polaroid evidence of the same obnoxious being in a tender embrace with a smiling Paris Hilton. It filled us all with outrage.

"That slimy bastard!" said the Tank, speaking for us all.

"It must be phony," said Ronnie, shaking his head. "It must be photoshopped or something."

"Nope," said the Saliva King, "I had my cousin Arnie test them out - he's a detective - and he assures me they're for real."

"They can't be!" protested Ronnie. "Seriously, how would Toadzilla even get that near to Paris Hilton? Its beyond all credibility!"

"It is," Lonnie agreed. "Even taking into account the fact that Paris Hilton has never been known to be that fussy, I just can't see her snuggled up with Toadzilla. Not in a million years!"

"And yet," said Max, fingering the polaroids, "Here she is... unbelievable!"

"And I can't believe," said the Todd, "That the bastard had the temerity to mail us all copies!"

"The Toadzilla ... one of nature's cruelest jokes..." said Lonnie.

"And Paris Hilton... what a honey!" said Ronnie, finishing the thought.

"She's not that hot," I said, taking a swig of coke.

"You see," said Ronnie. "That's what giving up alcohol does to you. You lose your perspective."

"There's no justice in the world!" said Todd, protesting. "Look at me! Look at any of us. We're not bad looking blokes. Are we? But do we get to lay the Paris Hiltons of the world? Not a chance!" He was genuinely enraged. "I just won't have this! It is an affront to the entire natural order! I've lost my faith in the cosmos, damn it!"

That indeed was how it struck us all. It was as if the Great Chain of Being had come unstuck at both ends. It was as if the Delphic Oracle had suddenly declared an ugly old pederast like Socrates wisest and most just. Something was wrong in the universe. The spiraling gyres had lost their roll. The Kali Yuga had descended. Some hideous beauty was slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Such a disjuncture in the natural array might convince a pious man that there is no Righteous Hand guiding all creation after all. How could we allow it? How could we sit by and watch our standards and our expectations crumble all around us? A truly awful thing.

Since school Ronnie - supercilious and undeserving - had made a small fortune selling corn chips to bowling alleys, but it didn't get him any women. Lonnie - handsome and happy-go-lucky - was as lonely as a telephone box in Bristol. Alistair's brother had accidentally shot his sweetheart during an annual ferret drive leaving her wheel-chair ridden and legally vexatious. Todd didn't find his soul-mate on a P & O Cruise to exotic Fiji as he had expected. And Max looked like a tank. Then there was my Malaysian misadventure and the kebab salesman. There are always injustices woven into the fabric of life. In truth, life sucks every bit as much as they reckon. But some injustices are an affront to every fair notion of proportion. And the idea of Toadzilla getting himself a piece of Paris Hilton was one of them. How could it happen? How could any just God in Heaven allow it to be? All those years of teasing Toadzilla, and now he gets his revenge. What events had transpired to place him in Paris Hilton's arms?

"Well it seems, Me Buckos," said Alistair - fount of all information - "that our Toadziller got himself a job as a security guard a few years ago and one night, on her recent trip, Paris Hilton hired him as her personal security man. And... I don't know... He got lucky. I guess she got frightened during the night and wanted a cuddle... That's the best I can do." He shrugged his shoulders.

"She must have been heavily sedated," Todd surmised.

"Look at this," said Ronnie. He passed around another photograph.

"Oh my God! What is that?" asked the Tank, genuinely irked.

"That," said Ronnie, "is Donna. Donna is the only female who's come within cooey of me in the last twelve months. Am I really that unattractive? I ask you guys. You're my friends. Be straight with me. Surely I can do better than Donna? Well?"

It was true. Donna - on the evidence supplied - was anything but a looker.

"I don't know," said Todd. "Don't be so shallow. Looks aren't everything. Maybe she's got a nice personality..."

"No, a complete nutjob," said Ronnie, matter-of-factly. "She's doing six months jail for coming after me with a tomahawk last New Year's Eve..." He had the scar on his left upper arm to prove it.

"Oh," we all said together, suddenly comprehending. Most of us had been there before.

"So, anyhoo," said the Saliva King again, "What do we do about Toadzilla?"

He just couldn't get over it. He looked at the photos again.

"What can we do?" I wanted to know, implying nothing much.

"Well, I'm going out to find the best-looking whore money can buy!" said Max resolutely.

"Don't be such a loser, Me Bucko," Alistair retorted. He'd tried that and found no satisfaction. He said he was only interested  in the "real thing." From time to time he glanced at his mobile phone and told us that he was waiting for an important text from a very hot young lady named Josephine and warned us that he might have to leave in a sudden so that they could rendezvous.

"How many women have you been with since school Tank?" asked Ronnie.

Tank offered to buy the next round of beers in order to avoid the question. Ronnie put him on the spot.

"Let me ask you Tank? You have had sex, haven't you?"

"What? You mean with other people?"

"Yeah. Preferably a female."

"Well sure."

"How many?"

"Females? Five or six."

That seemed like a reasonable outcome, especially for someone who looked like a Tank.

"What about you Alistair?" Ronnie continued.

"So, what is this Me Bucko?" he replied . "Kiss and tell?"

I tried to change the topic.

"What can we do? I think all we can do is sit here and commiserate with one another," I opined. "It seems like its true. Toadzilla spooned with Paris Hilton."

"So what are those Malay chicks like anyway?" Lonnie wanted to know.

I wasn't inclined to tell him.

"Did you get her by mail order or something?" asked the Tank, oblivious to how insulting the question was. He genuinely wanted to know. "I was thinking of getting one of them Russian chicks. You know, I got this email a while back and..."

"They're all scams, Max," said Todd, bursting his bubble.

"Well, apparently this Malaysian wife was. She shot through on a visa fraud, and..."

"Can we change the subject?" I insisted. "I don't care to be reminded about my marriage."

"Why don't we sign up Toadzilla to one of those mail order bride scams and..."

"He doesn't need one. He's sleeping with Paris Hilton!"

"Oh yeah."

"And we're not. That's the issue."

"And how did this state of affairs come to be? is the question" I added.

Because it was certainly not how any of us had calculated life after school. By our reckoning, we should have all gone off, married wealthy, gorgeous super-models while Toadziller wallowed at the bottom of his pond, bitter and alone until his warts consumed him. What had gone wrong? Had we all taken a wrong turn? Made some terrible error? Or was life just being unspeakably cruel?

"Where did I screw up?" cried the Todd.

As he and the others consumed more beer this question became increasingly compelling. Where did we all screw up? None of us - with the possible exception of Tank - were hideous looking  and all of us - with the possible exception of Lonnie - had reasonable habits of personal hygiene. So what perverse twist of fate had kept us all single and wishing while the likes of Toadzilla got the babes?

"I'm twenty-six years old," Todd demanded, getting distraught, "and tired of playing with myself in public toilets...!"

This remark - as the reader might imagine - was a conversation stopper, but he fixed it by hastening to add that he was merely being metaphorical, just to make the point, and we shouldn't take him literally. On this note, nevertheless, Alistair took a few minutes out to stand in the corner and text his love-interest, saying he couldn't understand why she hadn't called. "She's crazy about me, Me Buckos," he insisted.

"I know what you mean, though," said Lonnie, agreeing with the Todd. "My own sister bought me an inflatable lady for Christmas... It's demoralizing."

"Tell 'em about the cod," Ronnie said.

"Naaa."

"Go on. Tell 'em."

"Naaa."

"What cod?" we wanted to know.

"Well, alright. I had this girlfriend, Philippa, and she... she wanted me to spank her with a piece of smoked cod."

"What!!?"

"Why!!!?"

"Spank her with a fish?"

"Not just any fish. It had to be smoked cod."

"What the...!!!?"

"Exactly. Weee-ird."

"I went out with a bird for three months and every time I tried to kiss her she started sobbing and singing the Greek national anthem!" said Ronnie, not to be out-done.

"So what's she like?" the Tank asked.

"Who?"

He was talking to Lonnie.

"Your inflatable lady."

"At least she puts out..." Alistair surmised, returning.

"Her name's Cindy," Ronnie reported, "and she's blonde. A true blonde. And she's a total floosey."

"Let's leave Cindy out of this," said Lonnie, offended.

"I don't think I'd care to spend the night with Paris Hilton anyway," I conjectured, finally.

Ronnie once more put this down to alcohol depravation and made it clear he felt sorry for the likes of me.

"Is it true," asked the Saliva King, "that you Muslims can have four wives?"

"And all the concubines you want?" Alistair threw in.

"Apparently," I said, "But I haven't got even one wife, let alone four."

Somehow, this re-established some perspective and for the next ten minutes everyone concentrated on drowning their sorrows and talking football. Otherwise, all we had managed to do throughout the entire tete-a-tete was to confirm what we all suspected - namely that we were a bunch of miserable, resentful desperadoes.

When it was getting late Alistair - seeking to shift the tone of gloom - proposed a toast, raising his beer up high.

"Here's to Toadzilla, Me Buckos. Good luck to the ugly apparition. May he catch whatever Paris Hilton's got, may his balls drop off and may he never bother us again!"

This seemed like a reasonable summary, so I raised my coke and drank the toast along with the rest of them.

Just before midnight Me Bucko received a message from his Josephine. It was short and to the point, "Leave me alone, or I'II call the police!" it said.

As we were leaving, there was a pretty, petite brunette girl in the crowd who caught Lonnie's wandering eye.

"Hey sweetheart!" he called, beery and hopeful.

She turned around and looked at him. Then, with her stunning dark eyes, she cast a glance  over all of us together. When we looked again there on her arm was an obese bespectacled gorilla with an acne infestation that had spread from his forehead to his massive double-chin.

"You creeps!" she sneered at us, and she and her man made off for the bar.

Reduced to an uncomprehending silence, we stepped out into the chill night air and the dim glow of the lane lights more thoroughly confused than ever.