When I was six I was invited to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles themed party. My friend Elijah had invited me and when I told him I didn’t have a Ninja Turtles outfit and that the only fancy dress costume I owned was a Superman outfit, he told me that would be fine and just to wear that instead. You might think it’d be a little bit embarrassing to be the only person dressed as Superman at a Ninja Turtles party but what’s more embarrassing is being the only person dressed as Superman at a party where no one else is in fancy dress, which is exactly what happened to me. And yes, I know this is pretty much the exact plot of an Only Fools and Horses episode but instead of Batman it’s Superman and instead of a wake it’s a birthday, but this really happened to me, a long time before that episode was ever on television as well, years in fact. For all I know, the writer of that episode of Fools and Horses was one of the mums and dads at the party and as soon as I walked in a light bulb went off above their head, a few tweaks and they’d got themselves one of the all time-classics.
Unlike Del Boy and Rodney, I took this unfortunate situation completely in my stride. I just mingled as I had always intended to, all the other kids dressed normally, me as Superman. I could’ve taken my cape off but then I would’ve looked somehow stranger, so I stuck with the full get-up. I looked like one of those kids who wakes up in the morning and their parents let them wear whatever they please in order to express themselves, but in actual fact I’d just been lied to by my best friend for no reason. I didn’t even get made fun of, because Elijah didn’t even reference it when he saw me. Sure, a few kids had some questions but when I told them that I had been lied to by the host they just accepted it. They weren’t outraged or surprised, they didn’t find it funny, just a matter-of-fact conversation:
‘Why are you dressed as Superman?’
‘Elijah told me it was fancy dress but it wasn’t.’
‘Cool, I’m drinking lemonade.’
Oh to be six again. If I turned up to a party dressed as Superman as an adult people would be incredulous, they’d be telling me to go home and change, they wouldn’t be able to have a serious conversation with me, I’d be made to feel so self-conscious about my choice of attire that I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the party. But when I was six, apart from one kid who flipped my cape in the air and ran away, everyone just let me get on with it. Obviously what I should’ve done was fly around the world backwards so that we all went back in time and I could turn up at the party dressed like everybody else, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Fancy dress parties never got any better for me either. Jump forwards to Halloween 2014 and I had been invited to a proper fancy dress party where everyone would be in fancy dress and the host wasn’t a six-year-old or a compulsive liar. It was the party of some new friends; however, I also had to do a gig that night and wasn’t able to sort myself out with a costume in time. I was told not to worry because there would be a rack of costumes at the door for anyone not in fancy dress. Perfect. That way, if this was another trick then I wouldn’t turn up in fancy dress only to discover everyone in their normal clothes and then have to be a pariah all night long. Fool me once etc.
And so I did my gig then travelled to the flat in North London.
When the door opened I saw that the place was absolutely rammed but couldn’t see anyone I knew, and everyone seemed to be about ten years younger than I was. I later learned that my friends were in a different room and these younger guests were friends of the host’s sister.
The door was answered by a twenty-year-old male dressed as a skeleton. What was particularly noteworthy about this skeleton was that it had a scar painted across its forehead. This was the first sign that this guy was bad news. You can’t be a skeleton AND have a scar, it’s one or the other. You can have a crack in the bone or a hole in the skull but a scar makes zero sense. Pick a team. Still, maybe he was a nice guy and I was just judging him on his outfit.
He took one look at me, pointed at me with a can of beer in his hand and said, ‘No costume, fuck off home.’ I was right; he was a nobhead.
I laughed because I assumed he was just doing a bold joke. ‘I understand there should be some spare costumes lying around?’ I said.
He then plucked a costume from the rack next to the door, held it out to me and said, ‘Put this on, this is what fucktards wear.’
I’d never been called a fucktard before. He wasn’t smiling or joking either; he just aggressively called me a fucktard while handing me a red onesie that had a rubber wolf mask stapled to the hood, with a crown glued to the wolf’s head to top it all off. I had not seen an outfit like this before but I knew immediately what a look like this must be known as. King Wolf. I was to be King Wolf, which would’ve been fine but I’d also be a fucktard since ‘this is what fucktards wear.’ I decided to clarify the situation.
‘I’m sorry, did you just call me a fucktard?’ I asked.
‘Yes I did, just deal with it, fucktard,’ was his response.
I began to suspect that the scar on his forehead wasn’t fake after all and he’d once tried this shtick with a much bigger much stronger person who didn’t hesitate to lamp him in his stupid handsome face (credit where it’s due, he was pretty handsome).
There were some young women standing near the door, so I turned to them and asked who this boy was, and they told me he was my friend’s sister’s boyfriend.
‘He’s horrible,’ I whispered to them and they looked at me like I was the horrible one, rolled their eyes and walked away.
He turned to face me again. ‘Grin and bear it and put on the costume, fucktard.’ This guy really liked calling me a fucktard.
Now I’ve got a dilemma on my hands because on the one hand I want to get into the party and find my friends but on the other hand if I put on this outfit, this outfit for fucktards, this outfit for fucktards that a twenty-year-old has ordered me to wear, then I am admitting that he is in charge and I am a fucktard. I didn’t even know what a fucktard was but I knew I would feel pathetic if I submitted to this child-bully’s demands and so, with no one paying any attention to me any more, I hung up the King Wolf costume, turned around and left the party.
I don’t know if you’ve ever left a party early because you think everyone there is an arsehole, let alone not even entered a party for the same reason, but it’s one of the best feelings a human being can experience. I can’t recommend it highly enough. As I walked away I remember thinking to myself, I should do this every time. Every time I go to a party I should just look around and if I don’t like the look of the people in the room I should turn around and go home. Or if I choose to stay I should leave as soon as anyone says something rude to me. This is how I would live my life from now on. I felt so alive, and on Halloween – the night of the dead!
I didn’t need that King Wolf costume; I already felt like the King Wolf because this is the kind of thing the King Wolf would do, just tell everyone to get stuffed and then split without saying goodbye. I was the true King Wolf, doing my own thing in my Wolf Kingdom. No one tells the King Wolf what to do.
I stepped outside and walked round the corner, still feeling like a million bucks, when I heard a hushed voice say, ‘Excuse me!’ I looked across the road and there was a lady in a black dress with a white mask on the top of her head, crouching near a wall.
‘Do you have any food?’ she asked.
To begin with I assumed she was someone who had forgotten that the correct phrase was ‘trick or treat’ and was now having to go down a more literal route. But then she pointed up at a nearby garage. ‘There’s a fox up there,’ she said.
It’s almost like she knew I was the King Wolf. When you’ve got problems with foxes it’s only common sense to summon the King Wolf to defend you; she was probably very relieved to see the King Wolf whilst she was in this particular predicament. I walked over to her.
‘Pardon me?’ said I, the Wolf King.
‘What do foxes eat?’ she asked. ‘Bread?’
I thought about it for a second. ‘Maybe cat food?’
She took this news very badly. ‘Oh of course it’s cat food, how could I be so stupid?!’ she scolded herself. ‘Why would I think foxes liked bread?!?!’
‘Don’t be hard on yourself,’ I said (because I wasn’t even sure that they liked cat food, to be honest) and then, out of nowhere, a fox appeared on top of the garage, staring down at both of us with a calm confidence. As the fox and I stared at each other it occurred to me that maybe foxes and wolves were on the same side. I certainly felt like there was a mutual respect between us. Something about the way he held my gaze told me that we were equals. Maybe this was the King Fox, who’s to say?
The three of us stood there for twenty minutes. We stared at the fox and it stared back, we chatted to each other about our evenings, I told her about how awful the party had been, all the while the fox looking at us from the garage.
‘Where is this party?’ she said.
‘Just around the corner.’ I pointed in the general direction.
‘Do you think they have cat food?’
I am sorry to say that I refused to go back to the party with her to see if they had any cat food and to this day it’s one of the things I regret the most in life. My flatmate said there were two things I could’ve done that night that would’ve secured an absolute win for me. Number one was returning to the party with a nice lady, barging past the skeleton at the door, opening the fridge, taking anything out of it that a fox might like, then leaving and feeding it all to our new friend the King Fox. And the second one was that when I left originally I should have kept the King Wolf outfit instead of hanging it back up. Then I should’ve brought it home, put it on and taken a photo of myself sitting on my sofa with a beer, then sent it to the friends whose party I stole it from, including a simple message like ‘Happy Halloween’.
But instead I said we really should not return to that horrible party, said goodbye and we never saw each other again. Because she was a ghost and had been dead for five hundred years. And the fox was also a ghost. And everyone at the party was dead. And I am writing this from beyond the grave.