"This was the first time I had ever been attacked by a person while they stripped off." Carl Donnelly recalls a traumatic lads holiday, aged 18, in Tenerife.
The following is an excerpt from Different Gravy, the unpublished and quite frankly homemade autobiography by comedian Carl Donnelly. The excerpt comes from a chapter entitled ‘Friends Without Benefits’ and tells the story of fractured friendship on a lads holiday to Tenerife at the age of 18...
The majority of the holiday is now just a long forgotten blur but one night’s memory remains as vivid as ever. It was the night the group self-destructed. An end of night sing-song on a beach was in mid-flow when a play fight broke out between a few of our number. The cause of the fight was an unfortunate incident where one friend Aiden’s shoes had been removed from his feet and thrown casually into the Atlantic Ocean by another friend Rusty. This harmless joke had backfired due to Rusty underestimating his throwing power as well as the powerful tides of the world’s second largest ocean. The shoes (which turned out to be the only pair Aiden had brought), were lost forever. The jovial argument soon escalated and quickly turned into a mass drunken brawl involving us all. Drunken arguments and fights weren’t uncommon in our group but this particular one had an uncommon air of malice.
It luckily soon died off. We went our separate ways and myself and friends Rich and Lebby ended up back at our apartment. We got a well-deserved drink from the fridge and sat out on our balcony to cool off. It was at this point that Lebby turned on me and Rich in a fit of anger I had not seen since a drunken night at the age of 16 when he had pulled an authentic looking air gun on a McDonalds cashier causing an armed response unit to be called. He exploded with expletives explaining how much he hated every individual in our group (including us) and started removing his clothes. We could only watch as he stripped to his pants before us, saying how much he despised everything we stood for. This was the first time I had ever been attacked by a person while they stripped off.
It was once he was down to his boxer shorts that things seemed to calm down. He took a lilo, laid it out on the balcony and rested upon it. We sat at the other end of the balcony in silence and hoped that having expressed all of his pent up anger, Lebby was now calm enough to discuss his problems. We were wrong. The moment we tried to talk to him, he erupted again only this time from a horizontal position. As we again fell silent and soaked up the abuse a strange look fell across his face. Almost a look of concentration as he stopped talking and squinted his eyes. It was at this point, the horror dawned on us that Lebby was purposely soiling himself. As a hardened drinker, I am no stranger to the embarrassment of soiling oneself. What I was a stranger to however, was a person making the conscious decision to do so in front of two of his closest friends. To say we were shocked is an understatement. Not a word passed our lips as he strained until his pants were full to bursting point. He then began removing them.
Rich and I had not moved an inch, hypnotised by this mental breakdown. This decision to stay perfectly still turned out to be one of the biggest regrets of my life, as Lebby at that point naked and holding his soiled underwear in his hand, looked directly at us and threw them in our direction. I have in my life been close to death so know fear in its truest and purest form. However, no fear can ever match the feeling of watching a close friend shit himself, remove his boxer shorts and then throw the soiled dirty bomb directly at you. The shock was so overwhelming that we froze as we watched the arched trajectory of the missile and only flinched as it hit Rich upon the arm and exploded over both of us.
We sat aghast (and luckily closed-mouthed) as Lebby stood staring at the carnage he had caused on quite frankly an already dirty balcony. You’re probably wondering just how long into the incredibly awkward silence we waited for his apology. Well, it did not come as five seconds later he simply stood up, said “I’m off to bed” and walked away as naked as the day he was born and with a similar level of shit on his rear end. The apology never came but because of the bond between us, it never mattered. We knew that on that night Lebby had some demons to exorcise and if committing one of the most disgusting acts i’ve ever seen (and bear in mind i’ve been to Thailand) would help him do so, then we were there to take the hit figuratively and literally.
Carl Donnelly: Different Gravy is at the Pleasance Courtyard in Edinburgh, from 1st-26th August at 8:30pm
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