I Think You’d Better Go Home, Twinkle Toes

When I was a young man I worked for a local group of companies. I hated it so much I used to walk passed the entrance gate in the mornings (before forcing myself to do a U-turn.) Here I was working alongside a young man well on his way to becoming an alcoholic. Though usually glum, lugubrious, pessimistic his poker-faced and dry delivery of observations of life were often funny.

I’d never seen someone who had consumed so much beer they suffered from “the shakes”. He wasn’t that old either - about thirty if I remember. I can remember him sat typing into the Sage software on the fat IBM computer keyboard with fingers trembling so much they wouldn’t easily fix onto the keys.

Sometimes he would go missing for a while and once I found him in the toilet cubicles. I climbed onto the neighbouring toilet and looked over to see him sleeping, head against the wall. He would often spend all Sundays in bed. One Sunday afternoon he woke up in hospital not knowing how he’d arrived there. Later he found out he had got a lift down a street on a milk float. Somehow, while going round a corner, he fell off and ended up head-butting the road.

I was too prim and grey to be of any entertainment to him, someone who didn’t drink was more a pansy than a human in his eyes.

He told me about one Sunday morning when he’d woken up on his own couch at home. He lay there watching “Country File” on television, his regular “hangover cure” programme. He heard a noise on the stairs but this was nothing new. He assumed it was one of his drinking pals who had stayed the night. However he was surprised when a woman appeared in the lounge - on top of stilettos and under big hair. He wasn’t too drunk to see that she “was a she-male or a transvestite....whatever it was it was a chick with a dick”.

As usual, memories of the previous night was fuzzy. He just said to the man in his dry nicotine-ravaged voice, “I think you’d better go home, Twinkle Toes.”

So here is a painting based on this scene. The woman on the right is really a man. Look at the face - is that a male face or what? It’s rare I paint something accurately but that’s definitely a dude.

At one point the woman lost her shape and I had to thin her waist then upgrade her knockers up to a double-D (or something - what do I know?) I added some shadow behind Twinkle Toes to give this painting a little depth. Before I knew it the thing was finished.

I don’t like it. I remember a trip to Amsterdam once and saw there was a compact “blue light” area. Behind the many panes of glass were the “chicks with dicks.” Some looked more feminine than some women but some had Adam’s Apples that were bigger than their bosoms.