My brother wanted a party but didn’t want my folks around. I was the compromise. This wasn’t an easy decision for me; being against authority of any kind I didn’t want to put myself in a position where I had to enforce it. However I trusted my brother’s judgment and I assumed I’d only be needed in an emergency, I’d also being doing him a favour so I agreed.
In the hours preceding the party my dad was seriously freaking out, a few weeks ago a neighbour’s kid had had a party where the police were called because it had got out of control. I think my dad envisioned coming back to a house full of comatose teenagers choking on their own vomit. My mum seemed a bit more chilled, but she knew my brother’s fear was her security. As well as doing a favour for my brother I was given free piss for the night which was an influencing factor in my decision. My brother’s Birthday is on Valentine’s Day so it is always a difficult balance between family loyalties and keeping my lady happy. I saw this occasion as an opportunity to do both. My brother wouldn’t want us hanging around pissing on his bonfire, so my girlfriend and I would have his bedroom to ourselves for the evening. This allowed me to give my girlfriend the attention she deserved on all those Valentine’s Days past when I’d been dressing up as a clown for my bro. Of course getting down and dirty was out of the question as an innocent and impressionable fifteen year old could walk in at any time. We had to occupy ourselves with attempting to push the parental controls on my brother’s computer to their limits. Unfortunately my partner and I are computer illiterate to the point that we couldn’t even connect to the internet so we had to content ourselves with regular Friday night T.V. and getting as much piss down our throats as we could in the three hours before my parents returned.
Our Friday night T.V. extravaganza was soon quashed by deafening music coming from downstairs. The cop inside me wanted to run downstairs and bash their skulls in (or ask them to turn it down or something) but the hippy in me said “no let the children enjoy their songs”. Adding to my fury was the fact they were listening to fucking Led Zeppelin. Coupled with the fact that they were drinking Adnams and white wine, I was seriously losing any respect I had for the youth of today. If being asked to supervise a party hadn’t made me feel old, that last sentence certainly has. I’m becoming an old hippy cop motherfucker. I was at this point wondering whether or not to ring my dad and let him know that he had a house full of sophisticated Adnams drinking youngsters or to let the bastard sweat. I reckoned by now he had created an image in his head of an alcohol fuelled riot in his living room. Even if I rang to reassure him, I could induce a heart attack as he probably only expected me to ring in an emergency. I decided my folks would probably rather know everything was going fine so I rang them. I swear I could hear the tears of relief running down my father’s cheeks when I told him how grown up the little ones were.
I had obviously grossly over estimated how enjoyable the evening would be for my girlfriend. I looked over at her whilst supping on a bottle of Stella and her face was full of fury. “Is this the romantic evening you promised me” she hissed through clenched teeth. This forced me to consider it from her point of view, it was quite rubbish. I did suggest playing scrabble, thus digging my grave deeper. Fortunately my brother then came in and invited us to come down and meet his friends. They all seemed very nice, even though not one had a nihilistic bone in their body. We discovered at this point that one of them had broken a couple of my parent’s lampshades whilst dancing on a table, at last some action! However, my partner and I had to spend the next half hour persuading the kid that it was really not that big a deal. The poor little fucker was really shitting himself. I think we managed to reassure him slightly and quite impressively one of his friends hoovered the glass up. Anyway my parents came home and everyone lived happily ever after once the disappointingly small amount of mess was cleared up. All in all I’d give my brother’s party 6 out of 10.