Now is the Time to Smile, Motherfuckers

Just not in a creepy way, alright?

It all started in 1991.

I’d just purchased the cassette single (Cassingle) of You Could Be Mine by Guns and Roses from this record shop called HMV in the high street in York.

And I was heading home in the damndest of moods. I could have fucked a hamster. I was so happy. I found a phone box, called my mate Chris and told him.

“We should get some women over,” he said.

I agreed. But who?

“There’s that skinny white ginger chick with the glasses. What’s her name again?” he said.

“Kirsty,” I told him. I only knew because, in our school mixed basketball competition, I had put my arm out to block her and instead grabbed her left tit in the most accurate way one could imagine. Since then, she’d always smiled at me. She had incredible teeth, especially for a British person. And I’d get a hard-on every time she looked at me, thinking about how soft her left tit was.

I called my cousin, who was Kirsty’s friend, got her number and called.

Contacting people was a real fuck around back then.