Bucket Runner

I fell thru Cookie Monster’s front slammer, shattering small panels of glass about the hallway. The week before I had witnessed a pub dweller get thrown thru a closed door by a bouncer nicknamed One Punch Jarv, it had come off its hinges, I now knew what that was like, to be lying in littered debris. I cut my elbow but little else, I got off lightly, considering. Couldn’t his family afford a sturdier opening? Or was it my fault for being blotto and incapable of standing on my own two feet?

The accident sobered me up. “I’m so sorry,” I explained to Cookie. “I’ll pay for the damage.”

“You sure plunged thru that with your head there. Don’t worry, the council will take care of it,” he assured me. “I’ll ring them tomorrow when the offices are open. Now, how much more of my gaff do you plan on demolishing?

That’s Cookie for you, always laid back, always super-chilled. Probably because he was stoned as a fart.

Next I fell into the hallway wall, taking a chunk out of the plaster with my nut and knocking the mirror down. Luckily the mirror remained intact. I looked like I’d been forcibly jockeyed around Cheltenham’s Gold Cup and made to leap over all 22 jumps with a junior sumo wrestler on my back. ‘Jelly’ wasn’t the word for my legs. Surprisingly, I’d yet to throw up, although more than a baker’s dozen of Stella tends to have that effect.

Cookie stroked the damage to the wall gingerly, as if his midas touch could repair the damage. Nothing happened, apart from he got a coating of dust on his fingers.

Back on my feet again, this time I told myself I wasn’t going to fall over while crossing the living room, where Cookie had expensive furniture like fish tanks and coffee tables. Last week Rocco fed the Angelfish with his leftover kebab. One of them was motionless and floating on the surface not long after. He’d probably had his hands in there, messing around with them, taking them out and juggling them.

If I could just make it to the bathroom. There Picklehead Lisa would be running the buckets. She always did after a night out at Dragworld, the hippest shack in the locality for benders and puffs, where we’d been ‘poppin’ pillies’ like Post Malone all night.

I had to rip a taxi off in making my way back here. If I’d hurled inside the thing, the driver would have hit me with a 50 quid fine. As it was, I’d asked him to back up near the Sundowner pub. From there I’d entered someone’s back garden and navigated my way to the other side of the close. Couldn’t be helped. I was skint from 13 Stella at five pound fifty a pop.

Picklehead Leese never charged for a bucket. We tended to all throw in a few bits of quid at the beginning of the week so we could share a decent block of polly on occasions like this, when Cookie’s pops were working double shifts and we had license to be juvenile arsewipes for much of the Sabbath.

I did make it to the bathroom but I almost fell into the bath, instead landing on Picklehead and knocking the treasured bucket over. She got hot rocks on her denim dungarees, stood up fuming, and started kicking off. Pastry Face, our college mate, and so named because of what he got up to with Peshwari Naan breads in Indian restaurants, told me I was being a pissant. He shouted for Cookie and instructed I should leave.

“It’s not your digs,” I replied. I instantly had my guard up in case I was refused a chong. “C’mon, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean it.”

Picklehead undid the straps to her dungarees and let the top half flap down beyond her waist. Her ample nips behind a funky scoop neck sports bra were on prominent display. She always looked the part, did Picklehead Leese.

“This is so not funny guys,” she came out with, voice frustrated but keeping it together. “I was going to return these overalls within thirty days.”

“What’s he done now…?” Cookie Monster asked. He entered the room with his tremendous bulk like an oil liner reversing into a disabled parking space. He ignored Picklehead’s exposure.

I didn’t. I studied her twin package of small but generous bulging mammaries with relish. We usually all stared at Picklehead when we were mashed, imagining things we would like to do with her. The reality of the situation, however, is that she was out of all our depths. I frequently pondered why she would have anything to do with us. I honestly didn’t know what she was doing in the ‘here and now’ with us half the time. I’d heard something vague about her being Cookie’s second cousin, some kind of loose connection from a foster home in childhood, but I couldn’t trust anything out of Pastry Face’s trap.

Word was up that Rocco boned her doggy-groovy in the shrubbery next to Cookie’s duck pond, and then took a pik of her dirty knees to use as evidence against her, or proof for him, whichever, when uploading on Instagram asap. I thought all this complete and utter total bulldust.

I had masturbated to this imagery in my mind, nevertheless. Picklehead ‘getting done’ by Rocco’s big dong, her slim fingers gripping cabbage leaves. Judging by the eyeful of her cleavage I was registering at the moment, I’d be in a further rapturous spank banky time later.

The cannabis was like that. It made me horny as Pan on billy whizz. I leaned forward, took control of the buke, and ran my own.