“Dear Santa, Define Bad;” the slogan scrawled across every other girls shirt as they got ready for Christmas Eve festivities. A warm summer Christmas evening in Sydney; the mood was high and so were the locals. The tradition of glazed ham, family, eggnog, and goofy sweaters seemed non-existent down under. Everyone seemed drunk, or stoned, or both, and they planned to be for the entirety of the night as they stumbled through the streets in groups of Santa hat wearing, popped collar, ironic shirt clad Aussies and Brits.

Eggnog was replaced with a bottle of Jack Daniels, glazed ham; pub snacks. Maybe we just weren’t in the Australian Christmas spirit, or maybe just tired from the day of flying from New Zealand, but we thought 2am was a reasonable time to come home from wandering the streets and go to bed. Out of a dorm room with around 40 people stacked in bunk beds, we were the party poopers; the first ones to fall asleep…but not for long.

Her voice was loud; a nasal, whiny English accent, slurred through a sea of cocktails; “Well, if I’da know they’d call me a twat, I wouldn’ta worn this dress!” “They were just being mean, your not a twat” her friend consoled her. The word “twat” stuck out most as we were pulled from dreaming. The English don’t pronounce ‘twat’ like we pronounce ’swat,’ more like how we pronounce ‘flat,’ and for the next hour that’s all we heard, “twat, twat, twat.” Finally the English girls gave into their alcohol sloshed brain’s demands for sleep and we could thankfully do the same.

It took not the sound of forty drunk people shuffling in through the night, rather the consistent sound of very wet, sloppy kissing, seemingly very close to our heads to finally awaken us once more. It must have been 5am and a couple sleeping on the bunk bed below us were up to some cheekiness. At least that’s what she kept whispering in his ear (and ours so it seemed); “Oh your so cheeky…your so cheeky.” Ten minutes of muffled moaning followed by again, “your so cheeky, no ones ever done that before.” We figured that had to be the end of it.

By now the room was filled with all forty people getting into bed. The only ones still making noise were now having sex two feet below us on a rickety old bunk bed. We shook the bed, hard. We tried to mock them by making loud moaning noises. We had conversations with others in the room concerning how to shut them up. Yet the ecstasy and passion expressed in their lovemaking erected a barrier between them and the outside world, or they were just so belligerently wasted that they had absolutely no idea what was going on; I’m going with the latter.

Jess climbed down from our rattling bed to go to the bathroom and even yelled at them to hurry up as she passed by…no response. A friend of his came in at some point, “Hey, I’m just grabbing a beer, oh, hell yeah! Have fun,” With a brave slap of his friend’s thrusting butt, and a reach under the bed for a beer, he was gone.

Finally it was over. The shaking, the moaning, the slurping sounds stopped, and the two “cheeky” lovers detached from their coitus. The boy went to the bathroom and Jess and I looked at each other relieved, finally able to sleep. Then, the jingle of her cellphone. The girl proceeded to text a friend back, and forth, back and forth, jingle, click-click-click-click, jingle…jingle, click-click-click-click, jingle. My head finally leaned over the bed, I pointed at her phone, “if you hold down that little red button, the phone turns off” I sarcastically remarked. The most disheveled, belligerent face I have ever seen looked back at me “huh, why would I want to do that?” was her actual response. Finally her brain synapses connected, slowed exponentially by liquor, and she turned off her phone and went to sleep. Christmas 2007, a year we will never forget.

The follow up to that story is this: We didn’t know what to expect the next day; were these two just batshit crazy and horny as rabbits? The next morning Jess and I took showers, and I used my nice, ultra thin orange camping towel I was quite fond of, then hung it up on the edge of the bed to dry. We left for a few hours and upon returning the towel was missing! I asked those in the room nursing their hangovers to keep an eye out for it, and when we came back later in the evening it was left on my bed!?

So what happened? Apparently the boy sleeping below us has some horrifying aversion to suede and objects of similar material (is it how the cloth changes color as you rub the fibers one way or the other?). Apparently he woke up after we left the hostel, and on his way to the bathroom was trapped between another bunk bed and my terrifying suede-like towel. He yelled for a friend to save him who came in and threw my towel across the room under someones bed so he could walk by…freak.

<And Christmas day we spent on the beach. Along with everyone else in Australia>

Location: Sydney, Australia.
Written by: David Jackson