The Drought (The hilarious laugh-out loud comedy about dating disasters!) (29 page)

Your pal needs you! I am in
danger of going backwards and becoming a virgin again. Before that
happens I am asking you to assist me in a complete makeover to
create a brand new Dan. What do you say?

I clicked send and watched the
little envelope symbol indicate that my message had been sent to
Rob, Jack, and Ollie. Content with my new plan of attack, I picked
up my cup of tea and decided to get dressed. But as I stood
something out of the corner of my eye immediately grabbed my
attention and stopped me dead in my tracks.

Rosalie was standing at the
doorway wearing nothing but a large pair of white knickers and her
bra, a slight paunch exposed around her midriff.

“
Romantic,
señor?” Rosalie said nodding her head excitedly, her eyes wide and
duster still in hand.

Open-mouthed and completely
frozen, I was lost for words. To say this was not a sight I was
expecting to see would be an understatement. The smash of my mug
hitting the floor broke me from the trance.

“
I clean, I
clean,” she squealed, rushing over in her underwear and dropping to
her knees to clean the mess around my feet.

Makeover with Rob: The Look

Rosalie had
put her clothes back on
and
managed to remove the tea stain from the carpet
by the time I left the flat. What a woman. However, I had resisted
her middle-aged charms, and she didn’t seem too embarrassed by the
situation either. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t been tempted.
Had Rosalie appeared five minutes before my makeover brainwave then
this story could have been over by now.

Rob had been the first to reply
to my text. He had invited me to come down to his shop. He worked
in a fashion boutique in Wimbledon Village called Policy. I made my
way up the hill, past all the cafés and the bars where people were
spilling out on to the pavements in the summer sun. I arrived at
the shop and entered as Rob was just finishing with a customer.

“
Danny boy,”
he greeted me. “It’s time to get to work.”

Rob had
started working at Policy while we were at college and enjoyed it
so much he had stayed there. The job suited him down to the ground.
While the rest of us would be happy with a High Street T-shirt
costing 20 quid, Rob had to buy
Prada
or
Hugo Boss
costing five times that
amount.

Now the assistant manager, he
was often sent off to fashion capitals like Milan or Paris to pick
and choose next seasons fashion stock. He would talk about trainers
made of pony hair or try to preach how make-up for men would take
off. At times he came across a bit gay, but always regained our
respect when he would show us dirty pictures on his phone of the
foreign lovelies he had met on his travels.

“
Clothes make
the man,” Rob said quoting Mark Twain like he had done so many
times before. He stood behind me brushing the shoulders of a
charcoal blazer he had given me to try on. “Girls are very
detail-orientated. Before deciding whether they want to be with
you, one of the things they will evaluate is your
clothes.”

I looked at the price tag.
“Fourteen hundred pounds?” I said, absolutely staggered.

“
But this
is
Lanvin,
” Rob
said, like that was meant to mean something to me or justify the
outrageous price tag. “This is a blazer for 21st century
man.”

“
I couldn’t
care less if it was for 25th century man,” I said taking the blazer
off and handing it back to him. “I’m not paying that sort of
money.”

Rob hung the jacket back up and
selected other items of clothing for me to try on. Every time he
handed me something I would look at the price tag and then hand it
back.

“
Look,” Rob
said, finally losing patience with me. “You came to me. You are the
one who wanted my help. Now do you want my advice or
not?”

“
Yes,” I
mumbled, staring down at the ground and swaying. I felt like a
naughty schoolboy being told off.

“
Good. The
first thing you need to do is be willing to change. This is the
first stage of your transition and you need to let go of your dress
sense.” For the next half hour Rob worked his magic, mixing and
matching styles to find my look
.
By the end of it my head was spinning.

“
What do you
think?” Rob said as I looked in the mirror.

“
I... I think
I like it.” And I really did. Rob had dressed me in a dark blue
shirt unbuttoned to the chest, a light grey blazer, faded denim
jeans, and white trainers. It was simple but effective.

“
Take one of
these as well,” Rob handed me a leather purse with a tiger pattern
on the front in fake diamonds and jewels.

“
It’s a
purse,” I said handing it back towards him.

“
It’s not a
purse. These are the height of fashion; all the footballers have
got one of these bad boys
.
It’s metrosexual.”

“
Metrosexual?
It’s bloody gay.”

“
Trust me,”
Rob said. I looked in the mirror again and against my better
judgement I concluded that Rob had got it right so far so I would
take his word on the purse.

“
I’ve also
booked you an appointment at the hairdresser across the road,” Rob
said. “Ask for Kim.”

“
But...” I
attempted to argue my case. I liked my hair. I liked the fact I
could pay nine pounds to the same barber I had been going to since
I was six-years-old. I liked that we would talk football and all I
had to tell him to do was a number five around the sides and a
little bit off the top. I didn’t want to pay a small fortune just
to have my hair washed and head massaged before I was given the
exact same haircut.

“
No buts,” Rob
said. “You agreed to do what I told you.”

“
Okay,” I
nodded. “How much do I owe you?”

Rob punched a few buttons into
the till. “That’ll be £778.”

“
What?” I
gasped, dropping my second cup of tea of the day.

Makeover with Ollie: The
Body

“
Why have you
got your hair done like that?” Ollie asked as he bench pressed his
version of what he called a warm-up rep.

“
It’s my new
look,” I said. “Rob said girls like guys who look after their
appearance.”

Ollie sat up and screwed his
face up at me. I don’t think he was too impressed, but he didn’t
say anything else. Ollie had sent me a text agreeing to take me to
the gym on the Wednesday evening.

I took my place on the bench as
Ollie lifted the bar down into my hands. Immediately I felt my arms
buckle under the weight as I pushed with all my might.

“
Come on, you
pussy,” Ollie encouraged me, in his own special way.

“
Get this
thing off me,” I pleaded, fearing my chest was about to cave in.
Ollie lifted the bar and placed it back onto the bench. “I thought
you said that was a warm-up?”

“
No pain, no
gain,” Ollie said taking weights off the bar. “Try
this.”

I managed to struggle my way
through ten reps, huffing and puffing as I did so. Ollie spotted
me, offering slightly more positive words of encouragement this
time round.

“
Good work,”
Ollie said as I squeezed out my final rep. We swapped places and
Ollie fired off his reps with ease. I couldn’t help but think as I
spotted him that maybe I should offer some words of encouragement.
So I did.

“
Come on, push
that bad boy harder!”

“
What are you
doing?” Ollie said as he stood up to once again lighten the weight
load for my set.

“
Offering
words of encouragement,” I said with a perplexed look on my
face.

“
Don’t ever do
that again. It’s weird.”

“
But
I...”

“
No,” Ollie
cut me off. “There are certain things you just don’t say to people
in the gym,” Ollie explained. “For example, you should never
compliment a bloke on his six-pack unless you are talking about his
choice of beer.”

“
Okay, beer
talk only,” I said.

“
And never let
me hear you utter phrases like ‘
yeah baby,
push it’
.
And
under no circumstances do you say anything like
‘
just one more set and we can hit the
showers together’.
”

I nodded.

For the next hour Ollie put me
through my paces. There were times when I felt like I was going to
pass out, but Ollie kept right on at me. It was then I realised
there are two types of people who go to the gym. Insane people who
have escaped from a mental asylum and seem to think going to the
gym is good for you, and then you have normal people like me who
know better.

Of course, you have your
posers. They come in the shape of men who spend more time making
love to their reflections than the weights. And girls who would
turn up with a face full of make-up and spend all their time
walking on the treadmill, yapping on their mobile phone. By the end
of it I was ready to throw in the towel. I had never understood the
attraction of spending hours on end punishing your body in the gym.
But I had promised to see this makeover through, and I was
determined to prove a point.

Plus I’d been conned into
handing over £70 a month for the next year, and at the very least I
was going to use the showers three times a week to try and justify
some of that spend. I might even steal some of the towels.

“
A few more
sessions like that and you’ll start to get used to it,” Ollie
reassured me. “Give it six months and you will start to notice a
difference.”

“
Six months?”
I whined. “But I haven’t got six months. I need to get results
now.”

Ollie shrugged. This was a
major setback. I had fallen into the trap of believing I would end
up looking like Arnie after just a couple of sessions. As it turned
out I would have to live with what I had for a while longer yet.
But the worst part of this experience was still to come. As Ollie
carried me back to the changing rooms, I couldn’t have been less
prepared for what was about to happen.

Anyone who has stepped foot in
a male changing room at a gym will know of the horror story I am
about to tell. If Stephen King was to ever run out of ideas then he
could create a whole new genre with the terrifying ordeal that is
the male locker room. For some unknown reason, certain men feel the
need to walk around as naked as the day they were born. I am
talking completely starkers. Bits of flesh waving and swaying all
over the place. And the worst offenders are fat guys or old men.
Why they feel the need to flash their tackle to other men is beyond
me. Believe me when I say that the last thing you want is some fat,
old guy bending over and flashing his saggy bum and wrinkly ball
bag in your face.

“
Beware of old
man arse and wrinkly scrotums,” Ollie had warned me as he dragged
my lifeless body to our lockers.

*

As we walked back to the tube
station, I felt like my body was about to give in. Ollie lit a
cigarette.

“
How can you
smoke after coming out of the gym?” I asked. “Doesn’t that defeat
the whole point of exercise?”

“
Duh,” Ollie
made the kind of noise you make after someone has made a stupid
comment. “It’s because I keep myself fit that I don’t have to stop
smoking.”

You couldn’t really argue with
logic like that.

“
I nearly
forgot,” Ollie said digging around in his rucksack. “I brought a
DVD for you.”

I looked around to make sure no
one was watching. Ollie had never been the most tactful person in
the world and the middle of Clapham High Street was not the sort of
place you wanted to be receiving the type of DVD I’m sure he had in
his bag.

“
Oh,” I said
surprised as he handed me a copy of
WrestleRage
. “What is this
for?”

“
Girls like
guys with good bodies,” Ollie said. “But they also like guys who
can look after themselves.”

I wasn’t sure if that was
entirely true. I didn’t know too many girls who made their
decisions on whether to sleep with a guy or not based on his
fighting ability. From my experience girls preferred a bunch of
flowers to a bunch of fives.

“
Okay,” I
said, “but how is this going to help me?”

“
Duh,” there
was that noise again. “The main event of
WrestleRage
was the Iron Warrior vs
Flex Bruiser. Two of the greatest athletes ever to grace the
squared circle. You could learn a lot from these two.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell
Ollie that wrestling wasn’t real.

Makeover with Jack: The
Moves

“
Fourteen
hundred quid?” Jack gasped when I told him about the blazer I had
tried on at Rob’s shop. “You could get yourself a hooker with that
sort of money. Probably a good one as well.”

I was starting to get a bad
feeling about the third stage of my makeover. Upon hearing that
both Rob and Ollie had already got involved, Jack insisted that he
come round to teach me some “proper man moves” as he had put it. He
was even referring to himself as the missing piece of my
puzzle.