Tangos and titillations

“Yo,” Lofty half-whispers , “you’d better get your sad ass down here. It’s wall-to-wall women and they’re asking after you.”

There ensued a kind of hush. It felt like it was all over the world. “Er, what are you talking about, Lofts? Where are you?”

“The Love Ranch, you idiot,” he boomed, sounding much more like Lofty, “you wrote some rubbish about hitting The Love Ranch on Saturday night to win you a woman and they’re here in their bloody droves.”

“Are they wanton?” I asked.

“Wanting?” yelled Lofty over some ambient electronica, “they’re not wanting, they’re demanding!”

“Women? Demanding?” I said feebly, trying to overcome the fuzzy residue of a Saturday evening snooze with Chaucer, the Jack Russell. “Are you really at The Love Ranch?”

“Nah, you plonker, I’m at Rick’s,” bayed the prankster, cracking up as if Paris Hilton had just walked in wearing a chihuahua on her head. “Fancy a beer?”
Lofty is from one of the smallest towns in the known universe. I have to tell you this because, if you don’t know any men from towns like these, then you need to know this: quiet, unassuming, even shy when sober, they become raving lunatics after several of what they term “cold ones”.

“There’s a cold one waiting for you,” said Lofty.

“Hey, Lofts, I’m supposed to be meeting those arty women at La Tango. They’ve lined up a single friend.”

The guffaws suggested that George Bush had now entered with Ms Hilton spatchcocked on his head. “Yeah, right,” choked Lofty, “she’s probably a hippie in a
kaftan manufactured by Tent ‘n’ Tarp.”

“No, no, they said…”

“Okay,” interjected Lofty, “You’re desperate. You’ll need a wingman. I’ll see you there once I’ve got the barmaid’s number.”

Yikes. Celeste and Marcelle had talked the sophisticated Sophie into a blind-datish affair masquerading as a dinner party. Now I had lewd Lofty lumbering towards my rendezvous with romance.

I breathed into a paper bag and dawdled towards another date with disaster.

I arrived before Lofty (and Sophie) and was relieved to see tequila shooters winking on the table.

But Kristina had caught my eye. In truth, the more-than-an-eyeful of what was threatening to spill out of her little black dress had caught my eye, twisted it 360 degrees in its socket and sucked it out on a six-inch stalk. Yes, we men are all Loftys in disguise, we just don’t constantly give vent to our not-so-lofty thoughts.

Kristina was sans man. Her dark eyes glooped on to mine. “What a lovely hat you have, Fred,” she purred.
“Er, thank you,” I said, “and what a delicious…”

I was rescued by Celeste cooing, “Fred, this is Sophie. Soph, this is our new friend Fred.”

“Ooh,” fluttered an Organic Vege Market mama in a tie-dyed tent.

“Would you like to dance?” I blurted in the general direction of Kristina.

“Can you tango, young man?”

“Of course,” said the tequila.

My heart sank. Not once but twice. First, I knew as much about a tango as George Bush knows about leadership. And, second, there was His Loftiness heaving through the door, filling La Tango like Roseanne Barr would a corset at a Tokyo fashion show.

I left Lofty to introduce himself – as only he could - to the bemused dinner party and shoved Kristina on to the dance floor.

Kristina, clearly five tequilas ahead, flung me into a narrowing gap between an elegantly-dressed tango twosome. Mr and Ms La Elegante hastily stepped back and I skidded across the floor and stopped just short of a satin-wrapped waitress carrying a silver tray full of drinks.

Taking my cue from Peter Sellers in The Party, I grinned manically at the faces peering through their hands, dusted off my hat and stumbled back into Kristina’s arms.

Sensing my Cuervo-fuelled spirit, Kristina, with one breast now threatening a Janet Jackson, squeezed my tush for encouragement and my knees weakened as I stared into the creamy canyon of her décolletage.

But Lofty’s brain lurched into life, making a unilateral decision to distance itself from this dance of dunces.

Even Kristina’s vice-like embrace was no match for the Loft’s high school lineout tactics. I was spun like a top into a scrumdown, roughly recycled and torpedo-passed out of the front door.

“You long slab of dimwittery,” I growled while being prodded along the pavement. “I’m on to a cert…”

“Shut it, press stud,” rasped my captor, “I’m rescuing you from a certain death. What do you think was in that bra?” Lofty’s expression was almost emitting signs of intelligent life. “It was padded with cotton-wool soaked in chloroform. She’s into necrophilia.”

I licked my dry lips. It sounded delicious. But we were already back at Rick’s and Bronwyn the barmaid, shift finished, was propping up the bar with a titanically tattooed arm and a fag in a lushly lipsticked grin. Lofty lifted one arm in triumph, knowing victory was his without even having to trot out a try-line.

With thanks to The Weekend Argus