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Menk, by John Doran

Watching Myself Being Born As a Fully Grown Adult Through a Padded Foam Vagina

Chaos, vertigo and rebirth at the North London ball pond.

My name is John Doran and I write about music. The young bucks who run VICE’s website thought it would be amusing to employ a 41-year-old who is now "that one old guy" at gigs.

In case you were wondering or simply too lazy to use urban dictionary, "menk" is Scouse/Woollyback slang for a mentally ill or educationally subnormal person, and is a shortened version of mental. As in, “Your Sergio Tacchini trackie is sick la, look at that menk Doran, he can’t even afford a Walker trackie. Let’s hit him with a brick and push him in the canal."

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MENK 53: YOU CAN DO IT, PUT YOUR BACK INTO IT. I CAN DO IT, PUT YOUR ASS INTO IT

I’ve only been in the children’s soft play area for two minutes and I’m already sweating like a glassblower’s arse crack.

Maria is having her first weekend away from London without Little John, meaning it’s my first weekend in London on my own with Little John. If reality was a film starring Seth Rogan, my boy would have been kidnapped by a cross-dressing Mafiosi played by Zach Galifianakis by now and I’d have to enlist the help of a kindly prostitute and a chapter of gay Hells Angels to get him back. Luckily, this being real life, the weekend has been free of bizarre dramatic coincidence and hazardous misadventure. Admittedly, on Saturday I gave him too many biscuits and too much fruit during the day, meaning he didn’t eat any of the lovely lasagne that Luke cooked for him when I went round to visit. But that’s the kind of high-octane, child-based drama I can cope with.

Buoyed by the success of Saturday, the following morning I decide to take LJ to the Safari Soft Play area in the Sobell Leisure Centre in Holloway. If you don’t know what soft play is, simply imagine a primary coloured, four-storey foam-padded house with rope bridges instead of landings, bumpy slides instead of stairs, chambers half full of brightly coloured plastic balls instead of rooms and various apertures, slots and lobster pot openings instead of doors. As soon as his coat and shoes are off he disappears like a flash into the maw of the primary-coloured palace of infant dementia, his shouts of hyper adrenalised excitement becoming subsumed into the louder broadcast of ear-drum piercing, full-frequency roar of tiny-person approval.

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It is said that for years now a team of semiologists, scientists, linguists, philosophers and artists have been working on a puzzle: How would one warn future civilisations or visiting aliens, millennia hence, to stay away from the sites of nuclear accidents or dumping grounds for hazardous waste? The answer will end up being something akin to ring fencing cities like Chernobyl and Fukushima with soft play centre houses. As an unwitting intruder approaches, it will trigger the jet engine-like roar of a recording of one thousand toddlers screaming in unison: “Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad! Watch this! Aiiieeeeeeeeeeee!” captured at the exact moment the little ones swan dive off a bright yellow foam roof into a pit full of balls.

There’s a definite division of labour thing going on here; there are bunches of dads sat in the waiting area, drinking Lucozade and ignoring any noise that isn’t football talk from another dad, while the mums clamber inside the garish palace of screaming, ushering their kids from one high excitement zone to another. One mum slips over. This doesn’t interrupt the flow of children; they simply stampede over her head. She tries in vain to stop them but it’s like watching a boy with rickets trying to stop a greased pig in an alleyway. No way. She just has to let them pass before she can get back up.

The author, as photographed by Cat Stevens

Then I notice the sign: “All children must be supervised at all times.” Above the industrial bellowing of children, I can make out a familiar voice shouting: “Chair? Daddy? Choo choo?” I can see his face peering out from behind red mesh at the top of the structure. He sounds a bit unhappy as a steady stream of kids twice his age push past him roughly.

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“How did you get up there, mate?” I shout. “Give me a second and I’ll come and get you.” It takes me a while to work out how to get into the structure. I clamber up a padded log ramp. At the top of it there are two foam rollers parallel to each other with a gap of about six inches clear between them. Normally this is where I’d turn round but I can’t just leave him up there on his own. I have to push myself through what is essentially a mangle, if I want to go and get him. I stick my head between the rollers and that is uncomfortably tight. In front of me there is a distorted comedy mirror so all I can see is my bright red, sweat drenched, bearded head sticking through two bright red padded labia. I think I’m stuck, there’s no way I’m going to get my “barrel chest” though this tiny gap. However, I’m also aware that there is a big tailback of children and mums building up behind my slab of an arse. “Push! Push!” shouts one. I breathe out as much as possible, as if preparing to be shot out of a spaceship escape hatch into the cold, dark vacuum of interstellar space, and push myself hard until I plop through the tiny gap. Watching myself being born as a fully grown adult, as reflected in a crazy circus mirror is, no doubt, an image that will haunt my nightmares for some time to come.

After a few more scrambles and slides I catch up with my boy. He has got as far as a rope bridge, which we need to cross to go down a slide to get back to the ground level. I can see what the problem is; despite it being totally safe – all the gaps are secured with mesh – you can see straight down to the floor below. It must look quite freaky to a 23-month-old.

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I have terrible vertigo. Or at least I did last time I checked. About 13 years ago I had a bet with my mate Andy who’s a mountain climber that if I could climb an easy peak with him he’d come out with me and take loads of drugs. I lost abysmally when I couldn’t get more than 30ft off the ground. I don’t just get it up mountains, though, but inside narrow manmade structures as well. The three times I’ve climbed the Sir Walter Scott Memorial Building in Edinburgh, I’ve done the last stretch of it on my hands and knees with my eyes shut, convinced the structure is swaying in the breeze; likewise going up the interior of Monument in the City Of London is a terrifying experience. I take his hands: “Come on! One step at a time, you’re not going to fall…” He doesn’t really like it but once he's over the other side he loves going down the bumpy slide.

The staircase at Monument, London. (Photo by Matt Bridger)

At the bottom of the slide there’s another padded foam roller vagina for me to burst out of. I’ve literally only got my head through when I see John disappearing back up into the building again. My heart sinks. This time I charge up the log ramp and thrust myself through the foam rollers with rocket propelled force. I nearly hit the mirror on the other side. John thinks it’s a game and speeds up himself laughing and getting further and further away from me. However he stops by the rope bridge still full of trepidation, staring through the mesh at the floor below.

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The only time I didn’t have vertigo was when I was drunk and then I knew no fear. In fact, I’d go out of my way to find things to climb when I was clattered. Once in the mid-80s when my best mate Stu and I had been out in St Helens, we stopped at Rainhill Bridge for chips, mushrooms and gravy. Then, for reasons that now escape me, we climbed up the side of the Saint James Methodist Church and sat on the apex of the roof to eat them. After a while of pissing about and a thwarted attempt to climb the steeple, a police car drove past. We took the only option open to us and pretended to be gargoyles. The police car didn’t stop. We cheered and got back to eating.

After about three or four minutes another police car drove past so we did exactly the same thing. This happened about six times. “We’re invisible!” Stu roared. Eventually we grew bored and climbed down where we were immediately monstered by the Dibble. They frog marched us out to a squad car and put Stu in the back of it. After two or three minutes, another car pulled over. The driver leant out of the window and shouted: “I’ve been driving round the block for the last half an hour waiting for you pair of dickheads to get down. Did you not see me or do you think you’re invisible?” One of them rapped on my head with his knuckles: “Are you on LSD son? That’s what makes you fly, isn’t it?”

Somewhere around his eighth circuit round the soft play house, Little John gets straight on the rope bridge without pausing and powers along it, not even waiting for me to hold his hand. This time at the bottom of the slide he sees a girl who is definitely older than him. Probably two and a half. She is pretty and has a large afro. He goes up to her and starts babbling at her and laughing. 'The cojones on this one,' I think to myself. 'I don’t think I even spoke to a girl who wasn’t my sister or my mum until I was 14 and here he is before his second birthday hitting her with some lines before he can even talk properly. It’s a new day, it really is.'

Previously: Menk, by John Doran - A Fag in a Whalebone Corset Draping His Dick Across My Cheek

You can read all the previous editions of John's Menk column here.