Oh, you still do the ring?
CHAROLETTE: Oh yes. The wedding ring is a symbol of marriage, it’s a circle that is endless, to represent your endless love.
I find it odd that we’ve named a finger the ‘ring finger’. It just goes to show that we have too many fingers. I reckon we’d get by okay if we had lobster hands. People say it’s good to wear a wedding ring, as it reminds you of your partner, but you should remember them without that. The rapper Nelly went through a phase of wearing a plaster on his face, and people said it was supposed to be a reminder of his brother who was in prison. He stopped wearing it after a while, so either he invested in some Post-it notes or it fell off in the shower and he forgot all about his brother.
What I like about the drive thru wedding is it’s not about showing off. Take wedding bells: they only exist to show off. People who need to know you’re getting married will know about it, so why make a load of noise? It’s noise pollution, and there’s no need for it. I’ve never understood why people on Relocation, Relocation won’t buy a house near a main road cos they don’t like the sound of traffic, but think living near a church in a village is idyllic. Virtually every weekend in the summer those bells are gonna be ringing. If it was a car alarm people would complain.
Charolette gave me a quick tour of her selection of wedding dresses before we left. That’s another thing that puzzles me – why buy a wedding dress instead of hiring one? You won’t need it again, and it’ll just end up being shoved in the loft. I’m sure that’s why wedding dresses have got ridiculously big over the years – if it’s gonna be stuck up in the loft it may as well double up as insulation. I saw a wedding dress in the Guinness Book of Records where the train was 1.85 miles long! The bridesmaids could hardly say they were invited, as they were almost two miles away.
When I left I thought back to what Charolette was saying about how she lost the man in her life and hasn’t bothered to replace him. If something happened to Suzanne I don’t think I would want to go through with finding somebody else either. I’d feel quite lost without her. It would be like separating Siamese twins, as we’ve been through everything together. Which can also be handy, as my memory isn’t what it used to be, so I use hers as my back-up memory drive. I suppose a little bit of it comes down to laziness too. Meeting someone new would be like getting a new phone. You have to start again, input all of your information into them while trying to get to know their functions. But if I did want to try and find somebody new I don’t even know how I’d go about it. I’ve never been one for chatting up women. It’s not so complicated for animals. I’ve heard male pandas attract the female by showing off how high they can piss up a bamboo shoot! It’s like some sort of challenge blokes would do on a stag do. The problem is, I’m not the romantic type and I don’t agree with trying to charm people. That isn’t the real me, so they’ll only end up disappointed. I blame romantic films. They set women’s expectations too high. In films, when the man puts a coat on a puddle for a woman to walk over – why would you do that? Especially with the way the weather is these days; the rain never bloody stops. Add to that the amount of potholes, I’d be working day and night just to pay my dry-cleaning bills for my wet, muddy coat. And why is the woman walking in puddles all the time anyway? Am I dating a woman or a frog?
THE ART OF PICKING UP WOMEN
I went to meet Vinnie, a professional pick-up artist who was supposed to help me learn how to approach women, should the need ever arise. He runs a boot camp for people who lack confidence to teach them how to do it. The boot camp was in Nipton, a small town in the Mojave Desert about an hour away from Vegas. There’s not much to say about Nipton other than it has a population of sixty, one café and a few desert tortoises. Even though tortoises live for a hundred years, I doubt they’ve seen much change around Nipton.
By the time I got there Vinnie was already in full swing. Vinnie was a forty-five-year-old Italian fella. Not your stereotypical tall and dark Italian, Vinnie was small, dark and pink. If his neon pink hair didn’t grab your attention, his earrings, eyebrow ring, chin ring or tattoos might. He explained how his look is carefully put together to attract women and is known as ‘peacocking’, which is basically making yourself stand out from the crowd like a peacock showing off its feathers. I’ve always thought of them as earth’s natural drag queens.
There were five other blokes at the boot camp. I got in line.
VINNIE: In the 50s the rules of dating were well defined. You would go to a dance, approach a woman and dance with her. Then came the 60s, and women realised that they had a form of power. We call it PUSSY POWER. Right, grab yourselves. (grabs crotch) This is your social workout. If you don’t exercise it now, it’s probably not going to happen, because, gentlemen, remember, we are real men here. IT’S NOT GONNA SUCK ITSELF!
BOOT CAMP MEMBERS: It’s not gonna suck itself!
VINNIE: Come on, grab it! IT’S NOT GONNA SUCK ITSELF!
BOOT CAMP MEMBERS AND KARL: It’s not gonna suck itself!
VINNIE: If you wait for it to happen, it’s probably not going to happen. When was the last time you heard a knock at the door, and they say, ‘We have girls here, they want to talk to you’? No. If you want it, you got to go get it.
Vinnie could talk. But none of what he was saying was making sense to me. It was like watching a trailer for a film that’s exciting, but you haven’t got a clue what’s going on. I’m the sort of person who needs one-on-one training. This is why school didn’t work for me.
Vinnie told us all to grab a piece of wood and then explained that he wanted us to chop it in half using our bare hands. This was to teach us how not to fear tackling the unknown. I wasn’t keen. I damaged my right wrist when I was a kid and it’s not been right since. It aches when I plunge the toast in the toaster, so smashing it against a bit of wood didn’t seem like a good idea. He told me to use my left hand instead.
VINNIE: In life we sometimes have a tendency to make things harder than they are. Each of those boards has a slight natural curve. You want to make sure that you’re going to hit that side, because there is no point in making things harder in life.
MALICK (BOOT CAMP MEMBER): Yeah.
VINNIE: Now, there’s nothing worse than the sex going down the drain because then it’s only logistics, you’re just running a household. Nothing will keep a woman more interested than amazing sex, and it’ll make you feel good too. Research has demonstrated that men who have great sex do better at all levels. So pick a board and identify the side that should be facing. Does that make sense?
EVERYONE: Yeah, it does.
Don’t get me wrong – the sex thing, it’s alright. But I’m not a great believer in going at it all night. Get it done, get to sleep; it’s not something you should drag out. I’ve had neighbours who do that, and it drives me up the wall. To me it’s like getting a sofa through a doorway: you can waggle it about and try different angles, but you just want to get it into the hole, just get it done. I say be like a pigeon. They don’t mess about, they just jump on the back of another pigeon and it’s done in about two seconds and then they wander off again to find a bit of KFC chicken.
