‘We were in this Bar in San Francisco - a few of us from the hostel - and it’s like, this Sports Bar…so we go in, have a couple of drinks or whatever, then we fancy a game of darts; we get some arrows from the bar and we start playing but then straight away, these two couples come up…they’re like, these two middle-aged American guys and their Japanesy looking girlfriends, or wives or whatever.
‘Anyway, they’re really boring, you can tell straight away. One of them is this guy called Mike and the other is this, I can’t remember his name but he kind of had a Michael Bolton mullet going on, you know…receding at the top and sort of curly and long at the back, but it wasn’t cool I’ll tell you that much. Anyway, they’re giving it the big one, saying they play for the State at darts or something and they beat everyone in the bar regularly, so we challenge them to a game – and we’re terrible by the way – so me and my mate are playing this Mike and the Michael Bolton guy at doubles.
‘So I’m chalking the names up, and I put ‘Mike’ down, then I’m asking the other guy for his name…so he tells me it and I’m chalking it up, when Mike says, ‘Actually, my friends call me “Cowboy Mike”’ and I just turn and look at him…I stare at him and I’m trying to get it into my head that he was telling me I’d made a mistake – that I shouldn’t have just written ‘Mike’ on the board but “Cowboy Mike”. I tried to contain myself, tried to hold it in, but I’ve started to laugh because my mate is looking at me with this hilarious, “eyebrows up” expression on his face; I turn around back to the board quickly, then methodically rub out “Mike” and put “C.M.” in inverted commas.
‘Then we’ve started playing and me and my mate are struggling to keep straight faces; and they were shite at darts! They were slightly better than us, but you could tell they were no good; their throwing styles were crap, especially Cowboy Mike. Throughout the whole game we were saying things like: ‘Your turn Mike…I mean ‘Cowboy,’ and laughing and he didn’t even get the joke…didn’t get that we were taking the piss…he just kept playing and smiling, and his wife didn’t get it either, she just stood there like a lemon and laughed and smiled when they got anything over like, about thirty, as if she was really impressed with her man’s darts prowess, unaware that her husband was full of shit and had told us that he was an All-California Pro or whatever; and his buddy - the whole time we were playing - never once called him ‘Cowboy Mike’.
‘Afterwards we were like, “Yes, you have lots of friends…and they all call you ‘Cowboy Mike.”
‘What an idiot.’
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