RORY MCGOVERN
<Contributor>
When I was 24 and travelling in Europe I had the displeasure of meeting a man named Bond… James Bond. He was/is a complete cunt. The events of what ended up being a most psychologically debilitating meeting, will haunt me for the rest of my adult life. The story I am about to share has been hidden in the deepest recesses of my mind, suppressed by the mechanism in my psyche which buries trauma’s bitter antagonism in order to save the mind from its cruel and unrelenting violence.
The frightful details of this encounter only entered back into my consciousness after an extensive 12 hour session with a Caribbean psychic and astro-traveller.
My brother and I were enjoying the pleasurable suds of delectably cheap and unconscionably strong beverages at a hostel in Nice. The two of us, being rather well-built and solid 7’s on the ever popular 5 scale of attractiveness, were enjoying the affections of many a lust-driven female. In true Dos Equis-man fashion, we warded off their lecherous advances with razor sharp wit and epigrammatic genius that would shame Oscar Wilde. The effect of these charms of the mind was to fuel the lovely ladies’ desires for the company of our minds as well as our bodies.
After bombastically ordering another round for the entire table – 10 beers for 6 euros – the man whose face shall haunt my remaining waking moments approached us. With the smooth swagger of a spy and the alcoholic appetite of an Irish pig, Mr. Bond intercepted all 10 of the beverages and imbibed them, one by one, entirely by himself. Feeling territorial and needing to freshly urinate on my zone of supreme influence, I called to the man and told him to give me his name so that I might rhyme it with some crude insult. The purpose of this was twofold: to avenge the wrong he had committed against my brother and I, as well as to remind our affectionate compatriots at the table of my wit and charm. In response to my call, Mr. Bond responded with his usual bullshit stating that his name was Bond… James Bond. Temporarily stunned by the famous import of the name, the best I could come up with was a pun… on a pun. It was not witty, nor was it clever. It merely insinuated that he had bad credit and was untrustworthy by asking him if his name was backed by the ECB. A pun on my own pun… an attempt at scatological humour would have been more successful in achieving my desired end.
After the unnecessary mention of his surname twice, all of the once comfortably static females who seemed to be locked into their seats at our table, became ambulatory and took flight into the cushy throws of Mr. Bond’s super encampment on the other side of the hostel’s common room. After glancing over at his Gaddafi-like tent palace on the other side of the bar, all hope I had for the return of our once-cherished company vanished.
Mr. Bond had brought with him to the hostel a kiddie pool adorned with the 007 emblem on the side. He had a bouncy castle full of black and silver balls with 007 emblazoned on their spherical fun-ness and a supply of free liquor, the cost of which far exceeded the capacity of a marauding student’s wallet. He sat on a throne which he had borrowed from the Queen and took to the hostel to establish his dominion over the other hostel-goers. The throne was a marvel. It had a place to hang his 007 cape, a built-in cooler, and of course, a futuristic laser beam artillery set which he had turned down to ‘low power’ to point at the people in the hostel he was constantly mocking from the elevated pulpit of his outrageous high-chair (my brother and I). As we watched our former friends romp and play in Mr. Bond’s secret-agent fun-land, my brother and I decided that diplomacy might be a good tactic.
We approached the group and suggested a joining of forces. After hearty laughs and aggressive wedgies, my brother and I were robbed and forced to “bus” the 007-emblazoned, Queen-borrowed, mahogany tables… at gunpoint. Sobbing and indifferent to the now-useless elastic band on my underpants, I cleaned the table and attempted to make eye contact with some of our former playmates in a desperate and pleading attempt to recapture what had started out to be the most wondrous of nights. As Mr. Bond noticed this, he hurriedly called over some of the other young men and invited them to join the festivities. As they arrived, he promptly introduced us to them as his “cleaning wenches” and encouraged all of them to heap abuse onto us in the same manner he had done for what must have been over 2 hours.
When the night finally ended, and we had dutifully changed the urinal pucks in the 007 edition urinal with our bare hands, my brother and I retired to our room. I was struck by the callousness with which Mr. Bond conducted himself. As we lay in our bunk beds, staring straight up at the roof, my brother sent us both to sleep with the clever words of Mr. Bond himself: “now the whole world will know that you died after having scratched Mr. Bond’s Balls.”