The Pants-down Stand-off

Drug Dealer VS Your Author.

Winning laughs off drug dealers has the risk-reward profile of big game hunting. Nevertheless, I wanted three surly new trophies mounted on the smokeshack wall.

The garage was hopping with the usual cast of neighbourhood drop-ins, looking for a holiday smoke. These festive hold-outs were leant against the fridge-freezer, like henchmen on lunch break. Nobody overstays a welcome like a lingering Christmas Eve coke dealer. Trackie bottoms, cross-body bags, scowls: the top-shotta starter kit. Frightening by trade, nobody would consider politely insinuating they fuck off - or, at the very least, cheer up.

I flipped through my well-thumbed Rolodex of stock drunken antics. In front of me, somewhere beneath a bottlebank of misplaced drinks, was a sticky coffee table. I knocked back every glass of staling beer, wine and spirits, before dropping my slacks, as if lowering the curtain on a wonderful evening’s entertainment. Satisfied, I soaked back into my sofa groove. The warm glow of light cheers and competing liquors washing over me.

“Ha - put your trousers on, mate?” asked the chief goon, powerfully unimpressed.

I began pulling up my stretchy waistband, but thought - what I believed at the time was - better of it.

“Um, I mean, I will if you want, but… why?”

“It’s just disrespectful.”

“Well, not really. I’m wearing pants and a T-shirt. This is what fat kids wear to the swimming pool, no?

“Come on, put your trousers on,” he repeated, with just an edge more vocational threat. I know he was the one wearing the trousers in our short, rocky relationship - but he shouldn’t have final say on how much leg I show. This fashion-forward criminal took a slow step towards me. The rest of the room allocated some of their wandering attention our way.

In this life, some things are worth fighting for. A man’s right to trouserlessness in an old friend’s shed, of course, is not one. However, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of debating a cokedealer on the moral weight of a pair of downed trousers, in my mind, certainly is.

As per usual, I was all talk, no trousers. I’ve never really been in a fight with the use of my legs. Plus, any standing skirmish would require I first pulled up my kegs, precluding any need for a skirmish. I had one double-leg dropkick in me, before I was biting at his monitored ankles like a beached mermaid.

“Just pull your fucking trousers up, mate,” he chewed out, with one of the least loving ‘mates’ in the already-repressed history of matiness.

Few people have ever shown such self-righteous indignation while threatening a man sat in his underpants. Trousers, alone, do not maketh the man - or so my father taught me, naked from the waist down.

At the edge of my eyeline, the dealer’s grouchy understudy slid a bottle of Bud off the windowsill, cocking it behind his back.

“I mean, I just don’t think it’s really your place to say. It’s not your house, it’s up to the host.”

I turned to my mate, whose settee I was negotiating the half-naked fight from.

“Do I have to put my trousers on?”

A single word could defuse an 11-man armed brawl, on his mum’s property, on Christmas Eve.

“Nah, you don’t have to put your trousers on.”

Get yourself some friends who’ll back your nonsense to the point of bloodshed.

The tension in the room elevated. My trousers, did not. Both coalition forces in the Battle of the Fallen Britches downed spliffs. The air was heavy with exhaled smoke and the focus of approaching violence.

“Put. Your. Fucking. Trousers on.” The proudly dressed man was now standing above me.

A dude I was on smoking terms with returned from the garden with a spade. Moving away from my hometown, I’ve met a lot of interesting and like-minded people - but I’ll never have another passing acquaintance who’d bash in a cokedealer’s skull with a shovel, at the drop of a pair of trousers. In fact, he disapproved of what I wore, but he would defend to the death my right to wear it.

Although ‘8 Potheads + a Spade vs 3 Cokeheads + a Bottle’ is not a straightforward battle simulation, we would have reluctantly overpowered them in the end.

I looked up at him, grinning, expecting a punch. But, like most over-promised punches, it never came.

Eventually, my brother instructed, “Sam, put your trousers on.” I’ve been begrudgingly putting on clothes for my family since birth.

We drank until the next day’s Christmas dinners were inedible. The night lived on in our memories longer than most. High teenagers can have more fun in a garage than grown-ups ever could in a nightclub.