Crazy Al
Sitting watching TV one night enjoying a quiet beer, the doorbell rings, and there's Crazy Al, a schoolfriend from Adelaide who was great fun for a night out, but universally acknowledged as nobody you'd ever want to live with. And he'd somehow been given our address.
"I'm on my way to London," he says, "Got a stopover in Sydney and thought I'd pop over and say hi, lets go get a few beers in!"
The beers run late, so he asks if we'd mind him kipping on the couch "just for the night"... and so it begins.
The stopover, it seems, was as far as he'd booked the flights and as the days turned to weeks, Al would happily wander Sydney seeing the sights, getting plastered and coming home at all hours with an increasingly strange assortment of friends he'd made in his travels to eat all our food, drink anything in the house, crank the stereo up and have a great old time.
The final straw was the punk girl he'd met at a gig and brough home for loud sex in the living room, breaking furniture as they moshed nude.
With a dozen mutual friends and our parents friends with his we couldn't just throw him out, so...
The next day John (the flatmate) and I took action. We bought a bottle of tequila, sat Al down and started him drinking.
By about noon he was smashed and up for anything. "Lets go to the city!" I say so off we go. "Lets drink some more!" says John, so we do, "Let's go in the travel agency!" I say, so we do. "Lets buy a ticket to London!" we chorus. And he did.
By the time the bender was over, he was in huge credit card debt, we'd shaved his head into an anti-mohawk, he was packed and at the airport waving goodbye.
The phone call, when it came a few days later, went something like this:
"Fuck me, I have no idea how the hell I got to London, I just remember going out for a few drinks. It's freezing here and I'm almost broke, but I know a mate who lives in Islington who should let me kip on his couch for a night or two..."
God help them, he left more than a year later.
*Actually I've just been reminded I have a video cassette somewhere of John and I shaving Al's head while he sings. I'll see if I can a) find it and b) upload it somewhere).
( difficultchild, Fri 7 Jan 2011, 5:49, 3 replies)

He sounds like a cock.
Well done! :)
(LadyTramp79 Left a bit, right a bit..., Fri 7 Jan 2011, 9:26, closed)

This is a thing of beauty
A true memory to be treasured
(EvilMeister, Fri 7 Jan 2011, 10:20, closed)

I found the tape!
And there's a slight change. We *did* shave a stripe down the centre of his head, then just shaved his head entirely. I've really got to figure out how to convert it to an avi...
( difficultchild, Sun 9 Jan 2011, 23:21, closed)