Some people come and go in our lives without incident, while others leave an indelible mark. H was one without compromise - and quite often without humility, displaying flaws so apparent on a single meeting that he may as well have had them printed on a t-shirt or pamphleted around the area wherever he went to avoid anyone having to discover just what a heinous ******* he really was.
Conversely, he was also the most unfailingly generous person I’ve ever known when it came to noticing the actual or potential for good in others. A complete dichotomy of one seemingly split down the middle, irreconcilable in so many ways.
H also made me laugh like no-one else and some of the stupid things he did continue to. One evening, he decided he wanted a chicken club sandwich from the Oakley Court Hotel (famous as the exterior for the Frank N. Furter castle from ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’). It soon became apparent that absolutely NOTHING but this particular sandwich would do.
The hotel wasn’t far from H’s house, but neither of us could drive owing to having been revoltingly drunk since lunchtime, so we called a taxi and took a Tupperware box with us.
On arriving at the hotel, making it very clear the taxi driver should wait for us, we stumbled into the bar, ordered a round and requested chicken club sandwiches to go. The barman stared at us as though we were from another planet.
‘You are guests at the hotel’? he enquired, through narrowed eyes.
‘No,’ said H, ‘We have recently arrived from Uranus and would like to sample your earth food’.
That attitude, I asserted, wasn’t going to get us club sandwiches on any day of the week.
‘I apologise for my butler,’ I said, ‘He’s just got out of prison and his manners have lapsed. Please could we have two rounds of your delicious chicken club sandwiches’? Proffering the Tupperware to prove we didn’t intend to stay after slamming back the ***** tonics we’d just ordered, I added: ‘We’ve brought our own box’.
The barman wasn’t having any of it. ‘We do not bring food to the bar after nine pm’, he intoned. H checked his watch, which he never remembered to wind. ‘It’s only just gone nine’, he argued, then gestured, foolishly to the clock on the wall behind the bar that showed half past ten.
‘Sir, I’m sorry,’ replied the barman, clearly being nothing of the sort and having recognised our insobriety the moment we’d entered the bar. ‘No food served in the bar after nine pm’.
‘But we don’t want it served in the bar’, said H. ‘We just want it placed into our lunchbox here’. Snatching the Tupperware from my hands, he looked around, presumably for the door to the kitchen. ‘Would it help if I just popped along to the kitchen myself and asked them’?
The barman shrieked with a sort of strangled cry ‘Uh, sir, NO’. He regained composure, attempting, no doubt to tamp down the fear of whatever mayhem might ensue when this ****** idiot got punched by the chef for appearing in his kitchen demanding takeaway sandwiches.
Unperturbed, H pressed on. ‘If we were residents, would that make a difference’?
The barman pushed our drinks, reluctantly, towards us. ‘You would call room service, Sir’.
H shot me a look. ‘No’. I said, firmly, ‘We’re not getting a room just to order chicken club sandwiches, that’s ridiculous’.
‘Is it’? asked H, seeking definitive clarification.
‘Yes’, I said, ‘That would make a chicken club sandwich, like, three hundred pounds’.
H considered this for moment. ‘Be a ******* good sandwich for three hundred quid though, right’?
Querously, H negotiated for a full ten minutes with the seemingly immoveable stance of the barman, and had now begun addressing him by the name on his badge. ‘Kurt, what’s the reasoning for not serving food in the bar after nine o’clock? Give me something I can work with’.
Pondering for a moment, Kurt had the good grace to fully consider the question. ‘Because lots of non-residents use the bar after nine pm’, he gestured to the empty room behind us, ‘The kitchen does not have full staff at this time and could not handle all the orders from the bar as well as room service. Bar patrons would see the sandwiches and want them too’.
H made the face that meant Kurt’s perfectly reasonable logic was about to be ****** sky-high.
‘Kurt’, he began, ‘How many patrons are in the bar this evening’?
Kurt blinked, like a mouse asked where the cat is. He even looked around as though there may have been patrons hiding behind curtains or under tables. ‘Just… the two of you, Sir’.
H leaned over the bar, looking left to right in a conspiratorial fashion. ‘Just the two of us’, he said, ‘And we’re not going to tell anyone if you ask the kitchen to make us chicken club sandwiches. Scouts honour’, he finished, attempting a salute and smacking himself in the eye.
Kurt looked defeated. He was already reaching for the phone to call the kitchen.
‘On one condition’, he said, ‘You must sit around the corner where no-one can see you’.
‘Kurt, my man,’ said H, ‘I’ll sit on a ******* spike if necessary’.
Two hours and two bottles of sauvignon blanc later, we realised the taxi was still waiting on the drive outside.
As it turns out chicken club sandwiches do cost nearly three hundred pounds after all.
It occurred to me today to write up this silly little story as I recall an old, now-departed friend who always went to the daftest lengths to get what he wanted.