Bucket List of an Idiot
Page 1
DOM
HARVEY
First published in 2012
Copyright © Dominic Harvey 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Allen & Unwin
Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London
Level 3, 228 Queen Street
Auckland 1010, New Zealand
Phone: (64 9) 377 3800
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065, Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Harvey, Dominic, 1973–
Bucket list of an idiot / Dominic Harvey.
ISBN 978-1-877505-17-1
1. Harvey, Dominic, 1973– —Anecdotes. I. New Zealand Wit and humor. II. Title.
NZ828.302—dc 23
ISBN 978 1 877505 17 1
Photograph of McDonald’s plane, courtesy of Betsy Prujean
Set in 12.5/16 pt Bembo by Post Pre-press Group, Australia
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Foreword by Prime Minister John Key
I am an idiot . . . and this is my bucket list
Convince the prime minister to write the foreword
Fight a girl
Release an original song
Go skinny-dipping with my older sister in broad daylight
Visit a dominatrix
Hire a granny stripper for my boss
Get suspended from work
Bury the hatchet (the big apology)
Kiss a celebrity’s arse (literally)
Eat at a buffet until I throw up
Stick it all on black
Go pool crashing
Have a midlife crisis (get Botox)
Run the Boston Marathon
Prank my mum
Go to a gay sauna
Be a life drawing model
Cross-dress
Get a bad tattoo
Jump off the tallest building in New Zealand
Learn to meditate
Arm-wrestle an All Black
Track down my first kiss
Ask for a threesome
Do it on a plane
Run the paintball gauntlet
Have a crack at writing erotic fiction
Write a book
FOREWORD
BY PRIME MINISTER JOHN KEY
I AM AN IDIOT . . .
AND THIS IS MY BUCKET LIST
Hello, my name is Dominic diot.
I am comfortable with that now. I have managed to carve a pretty good career and make a decent living out of being an idiot on the radio. So, far from taking it as an insult, I consider it a sort of compliment.
I have always been one, too. Even in the days before I went professional and became paid to be an idiot. My long-suffering parents were among the first to recognise it:
‘Get off the clothes line, you bloody idiot!’
That was Mum when I was nine and probably more than old enough to know better.
We had one of those old rotary clothes lines and I thought it would make an awesome ride, a bit like a homemade merry-go-round. So I held on to one of the four arms that came off the trunk and ran until I built up a bit of speed, then took my feet off the ground, which usually gave me a couple of seconds of fun. Mum stopped the ride . . . on that occasion. Eventually I was forced to retire that activity when one of the aluminium arms designed for wet towels bent and then eventually snapped.
Granddad was another family member to recognise my gift for doing foolish things:
‘Dominic, stop being an idiot! Pull your togs up and sit down or get out!’
This came after an awkward incident in Granddad’s spa pool when I was twelve years old. Granddad’s spa, complete with artificial grass on the ground, was in a conservatory with a ranch slider. Conservatories were all the rage in the mid eighties—anyone who was doing well for themselves had this bizarre extra room added to their house. The artificial grass was not so popular—I believe Granddad selected that based on price more than appearance. This particular day I had my back facing the ranch slider and because the jets and bubbles were making considerable noise I had not heard Granddad come in. My poor old granddad, so meticulous with his spa pool maintenance, had walked in to see me with my togs partially down and my little white bottom half out of the water as I attempted to put my penis into one of the water jets. After that an extra rule was added to Granddad’s already thorough list of rules on the wall—NO SHENANIGANS! I did appreciate his subtlety.
When I left school and got my very first job in radio the name-calling continued:
‘What sort of an idiot puts dirty dishes back in the cupboard?!’
Luckily, I’d made it to the end of my three-month trial period before Steve Rowe, the radio station manager, came to the conclusion his most recent hire was an idiot. Since I was seventeen and employed to work the midnight to six am ‘graveyard shift’, Steve had given me a lengthy job description which included things like ‘clean the staff kitchen every night’. This pissed me off—I wanted to be a DJ, not a bloody cleaner! I didn’t do any of my own dishes at my flat, I reasoned, so why the hell should I have to clean up other people’s mess at work?
So once my trial period was up I started to cut corners. I would just put any real dirty dishes I came across away in the back corner of the cupboard, still dirty.
My cunning plan was discovered when one of the staff members saw a giant rat in the kitchen one morning. That rat was executed. I was lucky not to be.
Even my first proper girlfriend, Kim, recognised that her first true love was a fool.
‘Are you trying to burn the house down, you idiot?’
That came after she arrived home from work one day and found me squatting totally naked in front of the oven with my underpants dangling on the end of a wire coathanger that I had fashioned into a rod. In my defence, what was I supposed to do? I had no clean undies and no dryer. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
My old personal trainer in Palmerston North, Graeme Sciascia, had to agree with everyone else:
‘What sort of an idiot doesn’t wear underpants under his gym shorts?’
Graeme is a man with a big heart—and even bigger pectoral muscles—but the alarm bells started ringing for him this one session where he had me doing squats. This is where you have a bar loaded with weights behind your neck and you crouch down until your thighs are parallel with the floor, then you push the weight up again.
On this particular day Graeme had me squatting and lifting 140 kilos, a tremendous amount of weight and way more than I was realistically capable of. I told him this but he said he believed in me. I put the bar on my shoulders, psyched myself up with some deep breaths, then slowly lowered the weight until I was crouching not far from the floor. That was the easy bit done. Then I started to push to get the weight back up again. I pushed with everything I had. My face was red, veins were popping out in my neck, I could feel my eyes watering from the strain, and then it happened. My bowels spontaneously expelled gas from the force and, along with it, a small, perfectly formed poo, bigger than a Malteser but smaller than a scorched almond, which fell from my shorts and rolled across the floor. I was mortified. I put the bar up and, without saying a word, I grabbed a handy-towel, picked up the evidence and walked to the toilet to dispose of it. When I went back to the squats ar
ea, Graeme shook his head and uttered that sentence above, which did little to put my mind at ease. Had I been wearing undies or lined shorts I would have still had ‘the accident’. The only difference is it would have saved me considerable embarrassment. I have not done a squat or defecated on a gymnasium floor since that day.
Ever since the Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson movie The Bucket List came out in 2008, people have been creating their own lists of things to do before they kick the bucket. No two bucket lists are the same, but each list has the same ultimate goal—to make the list-maker feel like they are doing something useful with their life instead of just sitting around writing lists and watching Morgan Freeman DVDs.
Every person’s list is different. I’ve seen some of them and they look so difficult that I wonder if dying would be a better option than actually ticking off the items. I mean, where is the fun in writing ‘climb Mount Everest’ on your list? Bring it up on Google Earth, have a good look around, then get back to Facebook. This way you will get to experience the world’s highest mountain and you shouldn’t lose any of your fingers to frostbite.
Also, I am a life member of a cool little place called the comfort zone. People always go on about the importance of getting out of your comfort zone. It seems these days everyone is all about personal challenges and setting goals, all that Eat-Pray-Love stuff. Not me. My comfort zone is just that—a zone that is incredibly comfortable. And any day I can stay inside it is a good day.
People might say this is lazy but I don’t care.
For no real good reason (other than an obligation I had to write a book) I decided to complete a bucket list of my own, kind of like a reverse bucket list. A bunch of stuff that I could have happily passed away without actually putting myself through. Reluctant to challenge myself, I reached out to some family and mates to suggest items for the list. I’m not sure what your best friends are like, but mine are the sort that take great delight in seeing me suffer or squirm. Asking them to help me out is possibly just more proof that I am an idiot. The sort of things they wanted me to do were not the sort of things I would ever want to do. Some of the stuff was fun. Most of it was not. I was even left traumatised by a few of the things.
So here it is—my pain, discomfort and humiliation for your pleasure. THE BUCKET LIST OF AN IDIOT. Read it from start to finish, or go to a chapter that sounds interesting and read that. Read it any way you want. It is a perfect book for people with short attention spans. None of the chapters are too long so if, like me, you enjoy taking some reading material into the loo, it could be perfect for those visits.
Thanks for giving it a read. I hope you like it. Even if you don’t, you’ll probably still enjoy it more than I enjoyed actually doing some of these things.
CONVINCE THE PRIME MINISTER
TO WRITE THE FOREWORD
Book forewords always seem a bit show-boaty to me. It seems like a cheap ploy by the author just to sell a few extra copies of their book by getting someone far more famous than him or herself to make a guest appearance at the start of the book. And if the person who has written the foreword is enough of a drawcard, you can even use it as a selling point by advertising the fact on the cover.
Like Bob Greene did with his book The Best Life Diet. Even though Oprah only occupies a couple of pages at the very start of Bob’s book, her name on the front is in a font size not much smaller than the book’s title.
Bob’s not alone either. Heaps of people have tried to earn a bit of instant credibility for their book by convincing an A-list celebrity to write the bit at the beginning. Here are a few books I found where the writer of the foreword is far more popular than the writer of the actual book:
The Family Chef by Jewels and Jill
Elmore—foreword by Jennifer Aniston
Letters from a Nut by Ted L. Nancy—
foreword by Jerry Seinfeld
Unforgettable Steve McQueen by Henri
Suzeau—foreword by Brad Pitt
Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion
Against Low Expectations by Alex and
Brett Harris—foreword by Chuck Norris
Does anyone even bother reading them? I suspect a lot of people probably just cut straight to the first chapter, like skipping through that ad about movie piracy at the start of a DVD.
But rather than try to fight this, I was going to play the game. I needed a heavyweight to write my foreword. This book was not going to sell itself, so I needed to aim high—I wrote up a letter to the prime minister of New Zealand, John Key.
Dear Mr Key,
I hope you are having a nice day. I am writing a book and I would love it if you would write the foreword for it. The book will be called Bucket List of an Idiot and is basically just a bunch of stuff that most people would probably avoid doing before they kick the bucket.
I intend to do things like dress up as a lady and participate in a women-only fun run, get a regrettable tattoo and model nude for a life drawing class.
Having the current prime minister write the foreword for my book would be great for sales and give it the credibility it would otherwise lack.
Your advisers will tell you not to do it. And they are probably right. But here is a list of all the reasons why I reckon you should do it:
1. I voted for you in the last election.
Okay, that is the only reason I could think of. Stink.
I have already been turned down by other high-profile New Zealanders including the bloke on the five dollar note, Sir Edmund Hillary. Did you know that Sir Ed died a while back? I seem to have missed the memo on that one, which made for a very awkward conversation when I called about the foreword:
Is Sir Edmund Hillary there, please?
He’s not?
Well could you pass a message on?
You can’t?
Why not?
Wow, when did that happen?
Oh, I see.
No, of course I was not aware of that.
So, how about it? You’ve got nothing to lose (other than your reputation, credibility and the next election).
Thanks in advance!
Dominic Harvey
Author
P.S. I heard you have a bit of a sweet tooth so I have sprinkled some icing sugar in the envelope.
I did not get round to sending the letter to parliament. John Key came into our radio studios for an interview so I plucked up the courage to ask him in person.
The conversation went like this:
Me: I’m writing a bucket list book—can you write my foreword for me?
John Key: Yep.
And just like that, I managed to tick off the first item on my bucket list. That was easy. You’ve already seen the foreword at the beginning of this book. Unfortunately, the rest of my misadventures would not be quite so straightforward.
FIGHT A GIRL
Like most people, I want others to like me. But sometimes in my line of work you end up upsetting people along the way. It happens, and it sucks when it happens. Incredibly, though, my big mouth has only put me in physical danger once.
It was at my first radio job in Palmerston North, on the local station, 2XS FM. My on-air partner at the time was Mike West, and we were the kings of Manawatu radio. Well, Mike West was and I just happened to be there for the journey. The name of the show was Mike West and Baldrick. I was Baldrick. It was a nickname given to me by one of the sales reps at the station when I was a schoolboy doing work experience—it came from the Rowan Atkinson TV show Blackadder. The somewhat unflattering nickname caught on and ended up becoming my radio name because, just like the Blackadder character, I was essentially the radio station’s slave and sidekick. If you compared us to the Swedish pop-rock duo Roxette (though I don’t think too many people ever did), Mike was like the hot lady who sings and I was the unremarkable guy who just stands in the background playing the keytar.
This one morning, the big story in Manawatu was about a local sports star who was in trouble with the police—it was som
ething to do with marijuana. Mike and I had some fun with this, goofing on a little bit, making some obvious pot jokes and then holding a very dodgy mystery-sound contest, with a really blatant and obvious sound effect that was supposed to be someone toking on a joint—all against a backdrop of Bob Marley music. It was 1990s regional radio at its finest. After a couple of minutes of this we moved on to the next thing and forgot all about it. Just a throwaway bit which, in breakfast radio, you do a dozen of every morning.
A good couple of hours after that, closer to 10 am and the end of the show, Mike and I were sitting in our swivel chairs with our legs stretched out and our feet on the desk. It was about as relaxed as any man could ever hope to be in the workplace. There was a song playing and we were exhausted from another morning of clowning around and making jokes about people we had never met.
Unknown to us, one of these people—the local sports star we had been making fun of—had just arrived to see us. He told Vanessa—our lovely, if a bit too trusting, receptionist—that he was here to see the boys. Instead of asking him his name and inviting him to take a seat while she paged our extension to tell us who was here to see us, Vanessa told the agitated visitor we were in the studio, gave him directions, then sent him around to us unaccompanied.
As he burst in on us we had no time to register what the hell was going on. I was closest to the door and he lunged at me with a closed fist, clobbering me on the left side of my face. You know that bone just in front of your ear? That’s where he hit me. It knocked me right off my chair. Looking around for something to defend himself with, Mike picked up the most suitable item he could find. In a radio studio, the options on hand were limited, so he went for a metre-long rack we used to store sound-effect cartridges. In fact, the sound effect labelled ‘marijuana puff ’ was possibly stored in the very rack now being used to fend off the very man the segment was about. What a curious twist of events.