by Joel Golby
When I was nine years old, Labour won the election. I remember this because I woke up to my mother cheering—my mother had a very unusual way of celebrating things, which was to grit her teeth together, punch the air in front of her, and somehow without opening her mouth shout “Yes!”—and my Year 5 teacher came to school that day in a brilliant red pantsuit. I was raised in a firmly anti-Conservative household—I vividly remember bouncing on my bed at age seven, or eight, with my friend Charlie, and we were discussing the country’s prime minister at the time, John Major. “I hate him because he takes all our money,” I told Charlie, solemnly. I have no idea how that idea filtered into my young brain. I am assuming my parents whispered anti-Tory sentiment to me in the womb. “Fuck Maggie Thatcher,” they might coo through the bump to my fetus. “Burn the witch like she burnt the industry out of this country.” I’ve voted Labour all my life, and until they zig too far over the wobbly line in the center of British politics, I will continue to. You’re meant to vote to bring the rest of the country up, not protect those who have already made it. I digress.
The point is: fuck all that, because when I play Monopoly, I am David Cameron rimming Maggie off, I am Edwina Currie fucking John Major harder than he can fuck her back, I am a roaring-drunk Boris Johnson, I am Tory to the core-y, I am shaking hands with property developers in shady backroom multimillion-pound deals, I am blocking social housing to build luxury apartments in an effort to squeeze an extra £200K into my own private account, I am wearing a panama hat in the Cayman Islands and laughingly lighting a cigar with a £50 note. This is where Monopoly truly comes into its own: it allows you to rub away all your morals, all your ethics, all your beliefs, all the myriad ways you have been shaped into who you are today, all the saturated memories of Election Day 1997, all the bouncing on a single bed with Charlie, bemoaning the state, all that, gone—because in Monopoly you get, for a minute at least, to taste what it is to be the bad guy. To leverage property to crush those around you who you deem to be lower. You get, for a moment, to be Conservative and Republican all at once. You taste what it is like to be powerful and rich. And I would like to tell you, all of you: Stop this from ever happening to me in real life. Stop me from ever accruing wealth. Because, if Monopoly is anything to go on—and it absolutely is—I will become a monster.
There are moral lessons to be learned as a result of this evil that courses through Monopoly and into me. Take, for instance, the time recently when I crushed the soul of a ten-year-old down to dust. A lot of people say: “Joel,” they say, “it is unethical to extort ten-year-olds out of hundreds of dollars the literal first time they play Monopoly,” and to those critics I say: Fuck you, and fuck you again. The kid had just got Pokémon-themed Monopoly as a Christmas present. I volunteered to teach the boy the game rules by playing a dummy round against him. Nobody else was going to do it. And then he landed on my three-house Koffing (Atlantic Avenue), incurring rent of $330, and he learned the main rule of the game, which is that he owes me $330 and he needs to pay up. This is not how children learn and, indeed, grow.
Now, imagine you are sitting cross-legged on the floor down with me while I explain this: I am willing, magnanimously, to waive this fee, if he gives me the one property I want—Growlithe (Pacific Avenue), which would enable me to complete my green Monopoly. In my hand I also hold Starmie (Vermont Avenue), which completes his light blue Monopoly. We are at an impasse. We are also getting escalatingly confused by the fact that every road name is represented by a first-generation Pokémon.
So here’s where the game gets good, you see, because for a moment discount the rent: I want his Growlithe and he wants my Starmie. But he doesn’t realize I am in the position of power: Starmie is worth less than Growlithe, but he wants it—in that way that ten-year-olds want things on Monopoly, without the cool, calm cowl of logic—and so he wants Starmie primarily because he keeps landing on it and getting stung for $6 rent, and secondarily because it completes his monopoly. He thinks that because Starmie is worth a lot to him, then he is in a position to leverage more money out of me for the Growlithe. This, see, is how you crack the helix of Monopoly and force the mid-, then endgame of it: you have to negotiate, two wills meeting across an invisible space. The great lie of Monopoly is that it’s played on the board, with a small thimble piece and some die: no. Monopoly is played in IOUs and side hustles, of sweeteners and deals. Monopoly only becomes a game when you ignore the board and rise up to play it. Monopoly is only played when you negotiate. And that is where I am at the advantage, because I am an adult and he is a child, and I am evil and he is good. I will win this.
What we come to is this: I will pay $400 plus my Starmie for his Growlithe, which I am only allowed to build one property on (this is a canny side negotiation by the child: he shows promise). I will offer free rent on Koffing. He will not have to pay me the rent he owes me for Koffing, for I am a beatific developer, a kind and just Monopoly deity, plus more crucially I have now assembled an unyielding gauntlet from Free Parking to Master Ball (Short Line railroad). Now I know what you are thinking: This is an overly fair and reasonable negotiation, Joel! You’re throwing both money and opportunity away here! You could use this chance to crush him! But to that I say: I could crush him now, sure. I already am. But if I give him the taste for Monopoly—for the thrill, for the negotiation, for that blind, blind, blind pursuit of money—then I can make him love the game so much that I can crush him, again and again and again, dozens of times over dozens of games, for the rest of his and my natural lives. What I am saying is: Why crush someone’s soul, cheaply, once, when you have the chance to crush it a hundred times over?
I can delight in telling you that the boy picked up and threw two (two.) cushions at me, punched two more, and screamed into a fifth, before his dad came in and sent him furiously to bed. I am brilliant at Monopoly.
Back in Clapton, though, against adults, I have lost. Kimeya wins—she always wins because she grew up in a family that was venomously competitive and played Monopoly like it was an Olympic sport; plus she is a lawyer and started citing actual property law halfway through a negotiation over Pennsylvania Avenue—and we have all, separately, over the course of some hours, variously had a tantrum. A demon lives inside this game, I am sure of it. Pore over ancient texts and find which one. Pruflas, for example, the demon of falsehood, quarrels, and discord: that’s a good fit. Agares: earthquakes, foul language, and destroying dignity. It is fair to say every demon is assembled here, watching us, invisibly, wreak chaos on one another: demons of distrust, demons of extortion, the demon of shouting “Oh fuck OFF” when someone else lands on Free Parking: they are all here. In the cab home, I explain to the driver that I have just spent hours playing Monopoly, and am emotionally spent by it, and do not want to talk about my loss. “I used to play it as a kid,” he explains. “It taught me about the geography of London.” A pause. “I never finished it.” He tells me about a game of soccer he played once, where a striker was through on goal, and he yanked his shirt back to stop him from scoring, and how he got a straight red. “I was always a fair player,” he told me. “I don’t know where that came from.” I do: games like this pitch each other against our fellow man and bring out the dark and evil streak in all of us. Put your nasty side on and wear it for a couple of hours like a mask. Pull the shirt, kick the leg, outsmart a child. Monopoly is the best game because it allows you to be the worst person. Give me Baltic or I’ll cut you.
Party Hard
HALLOWEEN ’96
Once when I was a kid, my parents held a party, which was notable because it was just the rarest thing I could imagine either one of them doing; in fact, thinking back, a couple of major birthdays aside, it literally did not happen again, and I suppose that reveals some bleakness of true, bona fide adulthood—as a human on the cusp of his thirties now, I live in fear that the parties of my twenties were an anomaly, doomed to fade forever away, to be taken up instead by other humans, y
ounger humans, in their twenties; that I have crossed forever a divide, like a window I can only look through but never pass, where I can now only watch the young people, with their parties, having fun; that I am banished from ever having it again—the fear being that actual, legitimate adulthood is just a long slow fade away from the parties of your youth, and the party frequency demonstrated by my parents during my own personal childhood kind of goes some way to means-testing that.
Anyway the point is they had a party.
So it was a Halloween one, the party, which I know because I remember so vividly my dad’s costume: he had painted his entire head and skull (he was bald, my father, in that very inarguable way, an all-body baldness, his head-and-skull arrangement resembling a sort of large emotive walnut), painted his head and skull with a sort of cheap green face paint that absolutely did not cover his skin tone at all, making him look, instead of like a warlock or ogre, as was I assume the intended effect, but actually just as though he were about to be sick on an airplane or were feeling quite queasy but would get over it on a coach or bus; and, to complete the picture, he arranged on his head with stage glue a series of (unbranded) Rice Krispies, painstakingly applied, as sort of boils or warts. The overall effect was someone had very half-heartedly cursed a toad to live a human life. He paired his green head with blue jeans, a faded gray polo, a greasy-necked sky blue vest, and tan leather work boots, i.e., the exact same outfit he wore every single day of his entire fucking life.
My mother dressed more traditionally as a witch.
I knew this party was important to my parents because I had been very firmly condemned away from it. This was telegraphed to me repeatedly as we went about the preparty chores that seem necessary ahead of such a gathering: the three of us formed as a team to move the Big Table, the yard was swept, my mother made some sort of cake-in-green-jello arrangement that went largely untouched at the party proper and so was eaten by me for breakfast for days. My instructions were clear: at 7 p.m., when the party started to kick off, I would retire to my room and play imagination games, and from there after a while I was trusted to put myself to bed. I painted a sign for our broken bathroom door that read, “NO LOCK, PLEASE KNOCK,” affixed it with putty, brushed my teeth and combed my hair, then retired to bed.
Only I could not fucking sleep because of the sound of partying below me. Like: obviously. We lived in a six-room terrace house that was suddenly heaving with forty-five to fifty adults, most of whom I had never seen before and never saw again since and am still, some twenty-one years later, utterly baffled as to who they were and why they were in my house dressed as ghosts and such, but they were all drunk and yelling and not eating the jello. Whenever I was a kid and I couldn’t sleep, my mind defaulted to assuming that I was in trouble: that, if discovered I was in bed and awake past, say, the frankly illegal time of 9 p.m., I would be yelled at so thoroughly I would die. With the hubbub of the party below me, I lay perfectly still in bed (turning over in any way or fidgeting was not an option because the slight small noise of child on sheet would alert my parents to the fact that I was awake: they would hear it, somehow, over the conversation and through the ceiling, and they would pause the music and roar “EXCUSE ME?” and they would immediately march upstairs and take me to child prison), arms pinned to my side, eyes rigidly open.
I assumed I could just spend an entire evening like this—my plan was to just not sleep for twelve to sixteen hours, then, in the morning, walk downstairs with a big show of yawning, stretching of the arms, asking my parents mildly how the party was, Did You Have Fun, Oh Was It Loud I Didn’t Notice, that I could spend the next eight or nine nights slowly catching up on sleep an hour at a time, that eventually I would compensate for this overall loss. But then I heard sneaking on the landing outside my door, the sound of drunk women shushing, and my mother’s voice was there, detached, always, a voice delivered ever through great outward plumes of cigarette smoke, and one asked cutely, “Oh, can we see him?” and “Oh, can we go see him sleep?” and my mother, a witch, remember, said “[Sound of cigarette smoke exhaling] Sure. [Sound of more cigarette smoke exhaling] Go wild.”
Which is how we find ourselves with two women full-on screaming in surprise to find a rictusly awake child awaiting them when only they wanted to see cute dozing. My mother, upon this discovery: “Why are you awake?”
At which point I was dragged downstairs in my pajamas to be shown to the attendant party. I was a nervous boy, and this did not suit me: dozens of large, tree-sized adults, in black and with monstrous faces, peering down on me, cackling and laughing at the absurdity of a child up this late, handing me party snacks to eat with my hands in front of them, as though you might watch a squirrel consume a nut. And then I became incredibly weary, the kind of tired only a child in his pajamas in a forest of monsters can become, and fell asleep on a sofa, and my toad-father carried my limp body, sweetly murmuring, up to bed, where I slept solidly through the night and the subsequent cleanup the next day. And that was the first time I fell asleep at a party.
SUMMER ’09
When I was twenty-two, a nightclub opened up back home that offered what—looking back on it now—is the most absurd and ludicrous deal known to man: an All-You-Can-Drink night, with a £10 entry fee and a free coat check. I don’t know why the “free coat check” aspect of it seemed so important to me at the time (I’d had a coat stolen from a corner sofa in a nightclub about a year previously, and I suppose at the time that was…the most important and insulting thing…that had ever happened to me and completely changed my worldview on everything, based on whether they did or did not have coat checks attached to them? I don’t know.), but I remember that being the real clincher: not that I could get catatonically drunk in exchange for one crisp £10 note, but that my H&M jacket (I got it in the sale! It only cost £8 anyway!) wouldn’t go missing while I was doing it. Galvanized by this, the plan was set: we would go to the All-You-Can-Drink night and drink all that we could. Our coats would be protected throughout.
Well, we went multiple times. Economically, it did not make sense to get drunk any other way: even pooling your resources and getting supermarket beer crates and bottles of vodka to have at home didn’t work out at a drink-per-pound rate that could beat Elements, so we essentially spent a whole summer drinking the whole place dry. Did we care that the vodka was thinned down with water? We did not. Did it matter that the only lager available on tap was a sort of cheap fizzy unbranded thing that might well have been the recycled dregs of other, more acceptable lagers? It did not. Did we care that the atmosphere in there cycled through three moods (from 9 p.m. until 10:30 p.m., sober and vibeless; 10:30 to 11, pure and dreadful chaos; 11 to 1 a.m., some of the worst DJs in Chesterfield attacking us all with house music and a smoke machine)? Also no. To reiterate: one of the great selling points of this place to me was that I had somewhere to put my coat. This is as close to nihilism as I’ve ever got in my life. I didn’t care about anything.
I don’t know if you’ve been to an All-You-Can-Eat buffet, but the theory when transposed over to drinking is much the same. Every year for her birthday my aunt insists on going to this weird family-friendly world buffet place in an industrial park in Wolverhampton, where for £8 all-in you are issued a small white plate and the offer to go tonto on various hot plates of food. There is a pizza station, and a section that makes vindaloo. There is a whole grill where meats and fish are pumped out in piles. Trays of Chinese food, but also chicken nuggets. English cuisine is represented by deep trays of chips and every possible English breakfast meat, fried and left to sweat beneath a heat lamp. Go there with good intentions and leave with salt bloating: to enter the domain of the world buffet is to be immediately overwhelmed by decision fatigue, and you end up trailing back to your table with a plate high with chow mein, and somehow also roast potatoes, and then weirdly a wedge of pizza stuffed on top there like a cherry on a sundae, also for some reason brocc
oli. It is impossible not to have a bipolar plate of food when given the opportunity to serve yourself from a buffet. Which is a roundabout way of saying: yes, I was frequently very, very sick at Elements.
I was twenty-two, so I rarely stuck to one alcohol. Firstly we would have these neon-green little shots, which were terrible. Then maybe an awful fizzy pint or two, which were also very terrible. A terrible off-brand Jägerbomb would follow. Maybe a couple of (terrible) vodka-cokes. There was an hour in the night, every night, where the DJ seemed to play Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” five or six times in a row, so I would lean against a sweat-dripped wall and sort of sway to it, eyes half open, before going and getting another terrible beer. The toilets were attended, so had an odd array of aftershaves and perfumes plus a tray of lollipops, and you would always leave there heaving off the fumes of it, the heady mix of beer piss and Paco Rabanne. Then you’d go and get another terrible fizzy beer or something, try and stay upright long enough until the lights went up. We were frequently, frequently kicked out. One time my mate got kicked out so hard on a Friday that, when he went back there on the Saturday, he immediately got kicked out again, because the bouncer who’d kicked him out the night before recognized him as getting so catatonically pissed that she preempted him doing it again. “Miss!” I said, already three pints down in ten minutes. “Miss, please! His coat! It’s still in the coat check!”