There are running threads in my triptych of near doom stories, firstly, I nearly got killed on three occasions, secondly, the same person is responsible for each near death experience and thirdly, aren't triangles interesting (ever ran out of ideas mid-sentence? I have)?
The dude allocated the task of removing me from the gene pool (apart from whoever invented vaginal repulsion (that's "gayness" for those of you lacking verbosity (that's "homosexuality" for those of you resenting my use of slang (these are brackets used promiscuously for those of you who are now bored)))) is a being who I used to affectionately know as "Gaz".
Gaz was Beavis to my Butthead, Doyle to my Bodie or Makepeace to my Dempsey (he was the blonde one). A friend from school since the age of seven, we had grown up together with my other best mate, Richard (affectionately know as "Nazi" during his "military" phase). We all played football together, regularly fell out with each other, swapped girlfriends (I never wanted mine for too long) and got pissed together, as teenagers do. At some point during his teens, Gaz went a bit psycho and his dark side emerged with a vengeance. The first time he nearly killed me, he was very subtle aboot it:
Near Death 1: Suggestion
I think I was thirteen. Saturday afternoon, summer festival in Broadstairs and Gaz and I are bored with the festivities. There is nothing open, nowhere to go and watching people chuck polo mints at the girl nominated "Town Queen" or whatever is getting boring. None of the floats are interesting, people clap and wave like battery-powered monkeys by the roadside and our young cynicism is driving us elsewhere.
So Gaz and I break away from our families and head off towards the beach, to hang out, find something entertaining to do. Halfway down the high street, which is a steep hill, Gaz stops me;
"Look, there's Richard, let's go over and see how he is."
Stop. Ok, we haven't seen Richard for ages, he was ill or something, we never got the full story, so I'm desperate to see how he is. As a footnote, Gaz and Richard had started to dislike each other by this point, three is a crowd perhaps, at this stage, I was hanging out with Gaz more, because Richard was missing, so I cross the road to go and see him. Please note that the town is shut down for the parade, so there are NO cars.
Except one. One of the organisers of the parade, who coincidentally, we all know as Ross and Tom's mum. She drives a really cool beetle, bright yellow. She's very nice, but she is driving through this part of town to get round to the end of the parade, or something. So I find out very quickly that there is ONE car using the roads today: the bright yellow beetle that belongs to Ross and Tom's mum. The bright yellow beetle that belongs to Ross and Tom's mum that is hurtling down the hill towards ME. I can't get out of the way, Richard goes white, people gasp, brakes screech and the next thing I know, I have my hands, caught-by-LAPD style, spread on the bonnet of the bright yellow beetle that belongs to Ross and Tom's mum and its bumper brushing my skin as it lurches to a halt. And I'm staring wide-eyed and mouth open at a similar picture on the face of bright yellow beetle owning Ross and Tom's mum, who has just performed the emergency stop to top all emergency stops.
And Gaz is laughing. He's a singular cackle in a moment of complete silence. I make my apology for not looking where I was going and, in typical Mr John is always cool, style, walk over to Richard and ask him how he is.
I think it was Richard who told me off for not looking where I was going. Gaz just laughed at how I followed his intructions without looking around, but hey, we trust our mates, don't we?
Minor incident, I thought at the time. Lucky me. Yeah right, lucky to have Satan's little helper as a close friend!!!
Near Death 2: What goes up...
Knives are topical at the moment as well, I never realised this article could be so effing relevant. Makes a change for me - anyway Gaz and I were fourteen now, we were into weapons. Remember in the old days, parents gave their teenage boys knives? No? How about guns? No? Crossbows? Fireworks? We got all the above. My dad started it, he gave me a sheath knife with a 4 inch blade and attachments in the handle, like a swiss army knife x 2. Gaz responded by getting a 5 inch Rambo knife from Morocco, which had a compass and all kinds of stuff in the enormously heavy hilt. FUN.
So we're in his back garden, of a Saturday afternoon and I'm showing him how to throw it, so it embeds into a tree. A talent I am NEVER going to need, but am self-consciously out of practice at.
Did I mention Gaz gets bored easily? You know short-attention spans? His is cosmic. He could lose interest in the middle of a car crash in which he might be involved, in fact, from what of heard of him since we parted ways in the 90s, he's had a few and I'm more than willing to bet that nanoseconds into the point of impact, whilst glass is hurtling around him and the bonnet is crumpling like tinfoil, he'd find something else to do.
Gaz is throwing his knife up in the air. Gaz is casually tossing - actually let's change that sentence as it looks obscene: Gaz is casually flinging (that's easier on the memory) his huge, heavy fucking metal machete up and letting it land on the lawn. Near me a couple of times, the mad bastard.
I retreat, "Dude, stop doing that, you'll hurt one of us"
He cackles. I can still remember his laughter, it was deranged. My arms dealer, i.e "dad" met Gaz twice. The second time, dad told me he would happily "strangle the kid" and resorted to restraing a hyper Gaz with an arm bar, Gaz just cackled, unaware of how close he came to becoming an amputee. I should have taken this warning seriously, but I thought my dad was joking. This is the only adult in history who thought my hobby of exploding bangers I bought in Paris (Avez-vous des "Petards" s'il vous plait?) in a variety of cunningly-arranged ways was awesome. Everyone else just told me off. That's a different article maybe, anyhoo, Gaz is throwing his machete up in the air and avoiding it landing on him, for fun, the freak.
I back up, the last thing I want is this thing coming down on my head. I even stand next to a tall bush in his garden, for "protection". For some reason, I sit down. I think was trying an "act passive and maybe he will calm down" routine. And then he does it, he throws it too high, he says "I can't see it, it's in the sun" or something, then his gaze drops.
He is looking into the sun.
He is looking below the sun.
He is looking at my dad's son.
Oh fuck, that knife is going to land on my head.
I stand up to move, at 80% of my stature, I feel the impact. Brain processes are sketchy at this point, it's not until I see the knife fall of my shoulder and land, blade in the grass, by my feet, that I make the following calculation: dipshit throws it up in the air, the knife spins with its own fulcrum, it dropped onto me, handle first, bruising my head, bouncing off my shoulder and into the ground, I am a lucky son of a bitch (no offence mum).
Gaz isn't cackling this time, he's shocked at what just transpired. I'm more shocked. I have to sit down. My legs are shaking. I want to kill Gaz for doing that, we have just got off so fucking lightly for being irresponsible with fucking knives. But I can't feel my legs and my head is thumping. Get me a diet coke you git.
We stuck to guns, fire and explosives after that. Which leads us nicely onto:
Near Death 3: Has he got eyebrows?
I cannot for the life of me imagine how fast my brain works, but my immediate decision making process is awesome. I'm very proud of how quick I analyse and act upon available data, especially when things are on fire. My first thought after Gaz had disappeared in a wall of flames was "Oh fuck my friend has just been burned, what am I going to tell his parents?"
Then he appeared from behind the log and my second thought was "Has he got eyebrows?"
Yes, Gaz did indeed, still have his eyebrows. In my opinion the easiest way to tell if someone has been blasted in the face by flames. Somehow he had evaded fiery destruction. Thank god. Then he nearly killed me again. Friends should always share, eh?
Rewind.
His family had moved house, they had a huge garden now, his dad offered us money to shift an old log from a felled tree. Gaz told me to go home and come back after tea. I lived a mile away, so walked back, got food and returned later. Actually, he was a rubbish host. I catered for him loads, but scrounging a can of diet coke him was like pulling teeth. In fact, I probably had to risk being impaled through the head to evoke some generosity from him.
When I got back, he had collected:
- a spade
- 2 cans of "tab clear" - basically diet coke without colour (this was the nineties, yeah?)
- a can of petrol
- a weedkiller sprayer, filled with petrol. Basically a potential flamethrower.
At this point, I feel I should link to a messageboard post, so you can all debate what happened next. I'm guessing a lot of you are looking at the flamethrower and predicting fiery death spray everywhere for the two of us, but that, friends (i.e not Gaz anymore), is the red herring in this tale. Because here's what happened:
After half an hour of applying petrol with the lame weedkiller sprayer on this massive log, Gaz set it alight and watched it burn slowly. Quiet how this tame sprinkle of flammable lawnmower fuel was supposed to break down a half-tonne log, I don't know. Gaz got bored, because even setting things on fire without any safety precautions failed to keep him entertained for a microsecond. So he poured the can of petrol over the log WHILE PART OF IT WAS STILL ALIGHT. I tried to warn him and that's when he vanished behind the aforementioned wall of fire and I started scanning for eyebrows.
He was fine. He's probably typing up that bit on his own comedy website under a similarly titled article as this for fucks sake. The luck of morons kept him safe again. But I wasn't. He'd realised that the petrol can in his hands was now ablaze and decided to drop kick it away from himself, before it exploded like things on the A-Team, or French bangers, enjoy doing. Trouble is, he kicked it right in my direction, because he didn't look up first. Like with the knife the previous year, do some people never learn?
So I hear this "thunk" which sounds like someone drop-kicking a petrol can, look around and see the same face that watched a machete land on my bonce has just calculated that it has punted Fireball XL5 at my face and I start thinking, very quickly, how am I going to deal with this situation?
I distinctly remember my brain charting the following information before it actioned the rest of my body:
- There's a petrol can on fire, coming towards me, quickly.
- If I move left, there is a giant log on fire (moving is already a given factor in this equation)
- If I move back, it will catch me up, as backward motion is slow and I may trip over the spade which is lying around on the dry grass somewhere
- Round-house kicking it like Jean Claude van Damme (nineties) would be cool, but might go wrong, so being cool is overridden by "basic safety" for a change
- Diving heroically out of the way like the A-Team is impractical
- Fuck, it's really close now, just run sideways really quick
- Say "fuck" out loud
- Memo to self, "gaz" is "gas" in French, both are linked to accidental explosions, I should have seen this coming.
So yeah, I sprint to the right and the petrol can lands where I was standing, spilling napalm death (not the band) onto the really dry grass. Oh shit, the whole garden could go up. After acknowledging each other's safety and the general stupidity of the whole situation by swearing, we run around the garden putting out individual fires with the spade and the two cans of Tab Clear. It's like a Benny Hill skit, with us running around panicking and laughing, but with comedy tits replaced by comedy flames. Gaz blows the petrol can fire out - which is impressive, but proves it never would have exploded before he kicked it at me. There's one last hilarious anticlimax when Gaz flattens the last fire with the spade, we stop, breathe a sigh of relief, he raises the spade up from the ground and we both freak out - because now the spade is on fire - but that passes and we laugh about the whole thing.
But yeah, all-in all, this is a hat-trick of experiences that I could have lived without, even if it is funny to look back and thank my stars that I lived with them. I occasionally get news about Gaz from Richard, who hears from him sometimes. He might even read this someday and threaten to sue me or something, even though the above is all true (from my point of view anyway)!
A year after the last incident we fell out. I won't go into details, but our dangerous behaviour and penchant for destruction got us into real trouble and somehow, he put the blame on me. There were others involved, but we all stuck together and he decided to save himself, if you see what I mean. In the long run, it was probably for the best, as we parted ways and I gave all of my weapons of mass destruction to this nice man from Iraq and took drugs instead.
I've only seen Gaz once since. Christmas 2002. I summoned him with my mind, like some demon - no really. I was staying at Richard's, we got talking about the old days, subsequently Gaz came up in conversation. Richard and I went out to the 24 hour garage for late night snacks and boom, he popped into my mind as I exited the shop swigging a diet coke. Dunno why, I think I just went "be funny to see him now." And a car pulls up - it was him! Getting petrol at some late hour on Christmas eve, in the town we all grew up in and moved away from! I start laughing at the gross coincidence. He recognised me, tilted his head and just went "Is that you John?"
I barely hesitated. "Put that fucking petrol pump down you bastard!".
FIN
