The Dudes

Craig moved out after the first semester. For some reason or other, after Craig moved out, the house matured into a loafer’s paradise. Our last vestigial standards went the way of the dodo: the kitchen stopped getting cleaned at all, drunken people messed things up and sober people left the mess where it was.  It was an odd situation because I swear Craig never washed up more than twice in the whole time he was in FifePark, but the kitchen was always cleaner when he was there.

They don’t like wasting space at Residential Services; ask the bunk-bed generation, who had to study at their shared desk in shifts and still find enough time to cry themselves to sleep. We all understood that we’d get a replacement housemate. We still joked that we’d get a German exchange student called Helmut.

None of us guessed that he would be American, even though that was probably the most obvious option. St. Andrews has a permanent neon-lit olive branch at the other side of the pond, and the place itself was always highly Americanised, with the golf, Semesters, and the perpetual stream of tourists. Accordingly, there’s an influx of single-semester exchange students who bubble into St. Andrews at the beginning of February. We got Brad. We called him Helmut, behind his back.

Brad was a huge American, from Vermont. He had slightly thinning, curly, strawberry-blonde hair, and looked like he could bench a Buick. I don’t know how old he was, but he looked rugged enough that I reckon you could have cut him in half and counted the rings. He sported a stubbly ginger beard most of the time. He used to go out every day for runs, and would wear a bandana when he exercised. He used to go to the gym, which made him as far removed from, say, Frank McQueen as some of the higher primates.

He also routinely spent an hour in the bathroom taking a shit and reading the papers. The first time he did it, and the mellow stink wafted over the stairwell and infused the house with the aroma of poo, we all thought that something had gone seriously wrong.

‘Dude, I think Brad shat himself to death,’ I announced. Frank was opening a can of tomato soup.

‘Isn’t it amazing,’ Frank began, ‘how a tin of tomato soup fits exactly into one of these bowls?’ He carefully manoeuvred the rim-full bowl into the microwave and then threw a couple of slices of bread into the toaster.

‘So what’s it like upstairs with Helmut?’ Gowan asked.

[We even managed to convince Will that he was actually called Helmut, for the first three days.]

‘Well, not very pleasant precisely right now. But, ah… he seems okay. Just different, maybe. He doesn’t understand anything I say. We’re kind of talking at cross-purposes. You know he leaves the door open when he takes a shit?’

‘Right open?’

‘Ajar. Just enough to let things circulate. But he leaves his bedroom door open when he’s naked.’

[Brad hadn’t been entirely in the buff when I had walked in on him, but it was still a shock. He was unpacking his suitcase, in a pair of boxers. Brad had brought four books with him and little else it seemed. Three were guides to Scotland, including some awful-looking A-Z, and the last was Trainspotting.]

Just as the microwave pinged ready, none other than Brad walked into the room, evidently on a quest for a manly greeting of some sort. He chose Frank.

It should be said that Brad’s greetings were typically rugged and outdoorsy, with just a twist of frat boy, and therefore notable not least for their latent homoeroticism. Forewarned, this could have been a stimulating moment of pure cultural exchange. Frank never even saw it coming.

I was in a fortunate position, insomuch as that I could not only see Brad draw back his arm and swing it round in an exaggerated motion, before finally grabbing a hold of Frank’s derriere with a raucous slap, but that I could also see McQueen’s face, the picture of which will remain with me forever.

‘Hey, man,’ Brad said.

Frank was gingerly holding a bowl of bubbling soup, which was full enough that any motion whatever might have caused a burning spillage of hot tomato lava. He didn’t move an inch, in fact, but you could see in his eyes the exact moment at which Brad’s beefy paw impacted with his rump.

It was the look of an angry bull, but also the look of a frightened rabbit. It was the classic eyes-wide look of a cartoon animal who, forgetting himself, has just run off the edge of a cliff and is only too late realising the implications of this. Most of all, it was the look of a big hairy man, with another big hairy man’s hand on his arse, shocked out of his skin, and yet desperate not to spill boiling soup over himself.

‘I’m off into town, guys,’ Brad told us, leisurely removing his hand. ‘We’ll be drinking in Lafferty’s if you boys want to catch up with us later.’ And with that, he was gone.

There was an actual point at which you heard Frank start to breathe again.

‘Did you see that?’ he whispered. ‘Right on my arse? And, I mean, I’m not exactly a small man. There’s a lot of arse to get hold of.’

‘Well, he got most of it, mate.’

‘Did you see that? Did you see it?’ Frank kept asking over and over, in a small voice.

‘I’ll skin up,’ I consoled him.

It was all he could do to muster a subdued ‘mumble-mumble-something... Eggman.’

The Americans in St. Andrews usually stick together, the exchange students almost exclusively, and Brad was no exception. He rooted out a posse within hours of his arrival and, from then on, they were his crew.

We dubbed them ‘The Dudes’, and romanticised their better points. They, above all other punters, were truly Random.

We hung out with them a few times, but to little avail. If Brad had arrived speaking only Japanese, we would have found more things in common. Sadly, our apparently shared language seemed to be the greatest barrier to communication. We assumed at the time that we were using it to the same ends, but I think we were mistakenly taking that for granted.

Thank fuck for Dylan; he came into his own when the Dudes arrived. It was as if he’d been born in their midst. He could speak the dialect effortlessly, and we’d look to him for occasional guidance and translation. He even shrugged off his usual reserve and made out with one of them in the Vic one night.

‘She said that I was sick,’ he said. ‘That’s a good thing.’

The rest of us were hopeless. In conversation there was always the feeling that we didn’t quite understand each other, signalled by an array of awkward pauses, and trailing sentences. I got the impression after chatting with Brad that almost every aspect of our worldview was irreconcilable; that we were fixed in totally different paradigms; and that there was no way we could ever hope to communicate frankly. I’ve spent a lot more time with Americans since then, and I have nothing to add to this but my gratitude. Life would be a lot less fun if we were all on the same page.

Of course, alcohol being the leveller that it is, we got on famously if we ever made it out of the house. For the most part, they took their ales a lot better than I had expected, mainly because they were so big. Shots were another matter.

It wasn’t just Brad – most of the Americans, the lads at any rate, were gigantic. I don’t mean that they were fat; I mean that they had the physical build of redwood trees. Big ‘Bear’ Pete, for example, was an immense man and as solid as a mountain. He was one of Brad’s better friends and we often saw him around the house. We got on with him pretty well in the scheme of things. Brad and Pete made ‘Scotch Pies’ together one night, and we all had a beer and a laugh.

Pete used to wear a shaggy red and black plaid jacket that made him look like a lumberjack. He had massive amounts of scruffy dark hair and also sported a thick, close-trimmed beard. Pete was fucking built. When you call a Scottish guy ‘built’, you tend to mean that he can swallow more than his fair share of pints, swing his full weight, and has probably got no neck.

Pete was built in quite a different sense – he looked like he had been manually constructed out of industrial materials. He was all torso and no gut; a genuine Desperate Dan. Dylan suggested that it was to do with the amount of hormones they inject into cattle in the States. There was no hard science backing that up, but you could just imagine that Pete was seething with bovine power.

It might have been the ‘Scotch Pie’ night that most of Fife Park 7 went out on the town with Brad and Pete. The two Dudes, still in a perverse kind of tourist mode, had bought a decent bottle of Scotch that Bear Pete was carrying around in his lumber-jacket. On him, it made no more of a bulge than a deck of fags on any other man.

When we were all pretty inebriated, we went out to the union and played drinking games for an hour or two. It wasn’t normal for us to play drinking games when we were out, although we’d done it a few times in first year, but it gave us a common purpose and an opportunity to get pissed up with the Dudes, which was always welcome. The plan was to eventually meet with yet more Dudes who, we were assured, had a late-night housewarming on the cards and we’d wangled invites on the side.

I don’t quite remember the rules of the game we played in the union, but it was something to do with flipping a coin from your fingertips into a pint glass, and then having to drink, or not to drink, or something to that effect. I do remember that Pete’s hands were so big that he didn’t so much have to flip the coin as merely drop it into the pint glass. This would have put him at an unfair advantage, but for the fact that he was already so fucked that he missed the rim of the glass more often than not. Brad had huge hands too, as we knew only too well, but his coordination was also insufficient for victory.

We got through a few pints that way and then Pete downed a fresh pint in Olympic time, just because we were ready to leave and all assumed that he couldn’t do it. Every one of us was in a rare state by the time we left.

On the way out to the Badlands, the Dudes kept pulling out their whisky and chugging away at it, offering us a couple of swigs which we accepted in the name of friendship. By the time we made it to the top of Bridge Street, Pete and Brad were leaning on each other for support, and Frank was babbling on incoherently about being out with the Dudes.

‘Hanging with the Dudes!’ he shouted, to no-one in particular.

Enthused by this, Brad and Pete momentarily gained enough energy to high-five each other and jump around a bit. The effect of this was not lost on McQueen, who immediately demanded to know, amongst other things, ‘Who’s the man?’

Once again, the Dudes were briefly impassioned, leaping into the air and shouting out such delirious non-sequiturs as ‘Yeah,’ and ‘Alright, man.’

After inciting them to kick a few wheelie bins and traffic cones that were temporarily in place on Bell Street, Frank fell back a few steps and lit a cigarette. Pete and Brad once again fell into each other’s arms, for support.

‘Keeping it real!’ Frank called out, experimentally. Again, the dudes jumped, swung and kicked out at various inanimate objects before winding down.

After that, McQueen didn’t even bother to make the effort. Satisfied with his new found control, he dropped to a slower pace, keeping ten feet behind the Dudes and proffering more random, inane, sentiments whenever it suited him.

‘C’mon! Hanging with the Dudes!’

‘Who’s the man?’ Brad demanded at one point, catching the rest of us off guard.

‘You’re the man,’ Frank offered, immediately.

‘Yes, definitely you,’ I ventured.

‘C’mon!’ Frank called out, grinning as they flailed and danced. ‘Keeping it real.’

The Dude-flat was on

Nelson Street

; a group of fresh exchange students had rented a private place out, instead of plumping for a simple university residence. It was a typically self-motivated move on the part of the Dudes. If there is one thing I admire about Americans in general, it’s their willingness to have things their own way, and not merely settle for the serving suggestion. [Although there’s a damn fine line between confidently asking for something and sincerely believing that you deserve to get it.]

It was a decent house as well, not the typical student flat. There were screen doors in the dining room, plush sofas and a coffee table in the lounge, and a hardwood fitted kitchen with the kind of integrated dishwasher that serves to highlight the futility of middle class success. It had an overflowing fruit basket, to which we were entreated to help ourselves by various Dudes.

There were five or six of them in the house, but I don’t remember any names. Bryan, perhaps, was a short cropped Dude and instigator of the party, and there was a girl with frizzy black hair and a remarkably square jaw called Sam, or Sharon, who was Pete’s first target.

Pete immediately and systematically began victimising the occupants of the lounge. He was a restless drunk and wasn’t happy in an empty chair. Instead he sprawled anywhere that somebody else was trying to sit, clambering on top of them, his crushing weight suffocating whomever was beneath him.

When they had stopped moving, or in some cases breathing, he’d jump to his feet and pick a new playmate, only to crush them half to death as well, all the while laughing, tickling, jabbing and poking at them with enough force to crack a rib. He made a great drunk, it has to be said.

On the strength of Pete’s vitality, we soon found out what kind of a party it was: it was the kind that wasn’t. Some of Bryan’s flatmates were already objecting, particularly the flattened ones in the lounge and a ratty-faced studious Dudette who seemed to hate everybody and lived on her own upstairs.

‘I don’t know why you’re even here,’ she said. ‘But can you fucking keep it down?’

As a matter of fact, nobody knew why we were there, which was in equal parts amusing and concerning. Stripped of the context of an invitation, it appeared to all intents and purposes that we had turned up at a random household in the middle of the night and started assaulting people.

Eventually somebody came into the room and took Pete away, leading him by the hand. We didn’t see him again, and the ‘party’ cooled off immediately. Dylan went and helped himself to the fruit basket, and chatted ‘Dude-talk’ in the kitchen for a while. What had happened, he discovered, was that Bryan Dude had casually invited Brad and Pete back for drinks, and Brad and Pete had drunkenly over-interpreted the suggestion. All told, the Dudes had been pretty hospitable.

It was pretty obviously time to go. Frank wanted to apologise for all the noise we’d made so we decided to write a quick note and leave it on the coffee table. Dylan was the only one of us sober enough to hold a pen, but that didn’t stop Frank from wanting his say.

‘Sorry about the noise…’ Dylan began, before the pencil and paper were eagerly snatched away from him. In the end, the note read:

‘Sorry about the noise… bUt PeTE was FuCKeD.’

In fact Pete had so well disguised how fucked the rest of us were, that we didn’t even really notice it until we left the house, and Frank instinctively tried to steal the Dudes’ wheelie bin.

‘No Frank,’ we tried to explain. ‘We were just at their house. They’ll know it was us.’

‘They won’t!’ he argued, moments before Bryan Dude opened the door and told us to bring their fucking bin back.